Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain

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Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain 

Maxine Berg

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Maxine Berg 2005 The moral rights of the author(s) have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 First published in paperback 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978-0-19-927208-2 (Hbk.) 978-0-19-921528-7 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd King’s Lynn, Norfolk.

To my mother and to the memory of my mother-in-law

Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 1774. Institute of Historical Research.

Hail, happy land! Whose fertile grounds The liquid fence of Neptune bounds; By bounteous Nature set apart, The seat of industry and art! o britain, chosen Port of trade May luxury ne’er thy sons invade! . . . Whenever neighb’ring states contend, Tis thine to be the gen’ral friend. What is’t who rules in other lands? On trade alone thy glory stands; That benefit is unconfin’d, Diffusing good among mankind; That first gave lustre to thy reigns, And scatter’d plenty o’er thy plains; ’Tis that alone thy wealth supplies, And draws all europe’s envious eyes. Be Commerce then thy sole design; Keep that, and all the world is thine.’ John Gay, ‘The Man, the Cat, the Dog and the Fly’, Fable 8 [1732] of Fables by John Gay, Part II (Salisbury, 1800)

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Preface The encrease and consumption of all the commodities, which serve to the ornament and pleasure of life, are advantageous to society; because, at the same time that they multiply those innocent gratifications to individuals, they are a kind of storehouse of labour, which, in the exigencies of state, may be turned to the public service. David Hume, ‘Of Luxury’ (1752)

Luxury and Pleasure provides the story that is usually missed in our histories of the industrial revolution. Quality goods, bought as luxuries, served as the ornament and pleasure of life for a newly emergent middle class in the eighteenth century. These were the goods made by labour, tools, engines, and machines in factories, workshops, and dwelling houses, all those processes that we know so well of early industrial Britain. Newly designed and invented, they were the stuff of a product revolution we are only beginning to reveal. To really understand the industrial revolution we need to analyse the products and the people who bought them. Luxury and Pleasure continues research I started as a graduate student into the origins of and social responses to the industrial revolution, but it turns this research in new directions. I began this book many years ago in pursuing issues arising out of my book, The Age of Manufactures, first published in 1985. Institutional factors and personal serendipity, however, played as great a part as intellectual issues in my journey from manufacture to luxury. Together with existing colleagues in the Warwick Arts Faculty and a new group of Warwick Research Fellows I started an interdisciplinary eighteenth-century reading group. We read Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees and Edward Hundert’s recently published The Enlightenment’s Fable (1995), and so started my own discovery of the luxury debates. The luxury debates turned into The Luxury Project, funded by Warwick over a four-year period; it ran workshops, seminars, and major international conferences bringing together researchers right across the humanities. Engaging with the extensive new research on eighteenth-century consumer society as indicated especially in Brewer and Porter’s Consumption and the World of Goods (1993), it also turned the issue back to the way people of the eighteenth ~ ix ~

Preface century saw the big challenges to their societies. What really provoked the big changes was not consumption in general, but the desire for and ability to consume luxuries. Two volumes arising from the Project, Consumers and Luxury (ed. Berg and Clifford, 1999) and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century (ed. Berg and Eger, 2003) followed this trajectory. My own reading of the luxury debates brought me to the connections between luxury and industry, forged especially by the British as they sought to make a new modern luxury in the products that stimulated the industrial revolution. David Hume’s ‘ornaments and pleasures of life’ were to be made of ‘our own steel and iron’ instead of the ‘gold and rubies of the Indies’. Montesquieu’s ‘sweet commerce’ was the beneficent trade encouraged by Britain’s ‘good luxury’. Adam Smith’s ‘toys’ and ‘ingenious contrivances’ filled the pockets of delighted shoppers eager to show off their latest gadgets. Not just the eighteenth-century luxury debates, but the neglected byways of earlier generations of economic historians led me to a peculiarly British product revolution. Elizabeth Gilboy’s account written in the 1930s pointed to the stimulus created in the eighteenth century by ‘new wants’ and ‘new articles’. John Nef ’s little read Cultural Foundations of Industrial Civilization (1958) pointed to a lost ‘quality path of industrial development’, pursued in Britain for a time from the seventeenth century. John Harris placed the technological modernity of British metal ornament and toys in European perspective over a lifetime’s research culminating in his Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer (1998). And David Landes’s Unbound Prometheus (1968) likewise conveyed the lessons of metals and the lateral connections among precision technologies. His Revolution in Time (1983) showed how watches and small timepieces privatized and personalized time. Here were the pleasures of miniaturization, the comparison of performance; goods that worked and goods for private and intimate spaces. The sources of pleasure were also the sources of technological progress. Serendipity brought another key to the origins of British luxury. This came in an invitation from the Datini Institute in Prato in 1997 to present a wide-ranging paper on the impact of Asia on European industry in the early modern period. I focused on porcelain, printed cotton calicoes, and lacquerware, and discovered just how European and especially British manufacturers and consumers turned ‘oriental luxury’ into new consumer products. Writing this paper opened my eyes to the formative part played by the wider world trade in luxury goods from Asia in the making of the industrial revolution. My formerly insular industrial revolution thus turned into an event of global history. ~x~

Preface I have incurred many debts on the way to writing this book. The University of Warwick, where I have made my career, encouraged and supported initiative. Sir Brian Follett started the Warwick Research Fellows scheme and the Research Initiatives Fund that prompted me to make luxury not just an idea, but a project. Warwick provided sabbatical leave, the start-up research grants to develop new initiatives, and most recently a research travel grant to see some of those sources of ‘goods from the East’ in South India. The Nuffield Foundation, the ESRC, the AHRB and most notably the Leverhulme Trust provided the funding to research and write parts of this book, as well as to start a number of related initiatives pursued by younger researchers.The Guggenheim Foundation awarded me a Fellowship during 2003–4, a year in which I finished writing my book, and started new research on Indian and Chinese technologies and products for global trade. The Rothermere American Institute in Oxford made me a Fellow, and in the office it provided I revised chapters first written in the Voltaire Room of the Taylorian Institute, and researched and wrote my chapter on trade to the American colonies.The Scouloudi Fund supported the costs of picture permissions. I have worked in archives, libraries, and museums all over Britain and parts of the USA, and am grateful indeed for the knowledge, scholarship, and unstinting help their staff provided. David Landes, Pat Hudson, Jan de Vries, Neil De Marchi, and Marina Bianchi in their very different ways contributed frameworks to my story. Peter Mathias taught me while I was a research student that technology and economic history are about culture, and must be part of wider history. Anne Janowitz pushed and pulled me into seeing the interdisciplinary significance of my work. We created the Luxury Project together. This book was made in dialogue with many research fellows, research students, and assistants associated with this project and others before and after it: Elizabeth Eger, Jonathan White, Claire Walsh, Matthew Craske, Ingrid Sykes, Philippa Hubbard, Chloe Parkin, Matt Adams, Caroline Fontaine, Frances Davis, Karima Hanna, and Frances White. Patrick O’Brien, John Brewer, Beverly Lemire, and Colin Jones have read papers and project applications; they have urged me to go further. Liliane Hilaire-Pérez and Kristine Bruland have helped me in leading the Warwick-CNAM, Paris Research Interchange, reminded me of the extent to which Britain was part of Europe during the eighteenth century, and have kept me to my technological roots. Toshio Kusamitsu invited me to a workshop he organized in 2000 on Luxury and the Orient in Tokyo, followed by a series of interviews with artists and craftspeople in Kyoto. Frank Trentmann and Roey Sweet were ~ xi ~

Preface encouraging and careful readers. Margot Finn, ever generous with her time, took great trouble over the text and demanded the changes that needed to be made. Those changes were made in early morning sessions at my parents’ dining-room table; they have shown great forbearance with a daughter who travelled 6000, miles to see them, and carried on working over family visits. Ruth Parr welcomed my proposal to the OUP and acted on it immediately, and Anne Gelling and Kay Rogers saw the book through the Press. Genevieve Hawkins applied her sharp eye to the proofs. I am particularly indebted to Helen Clifford; we have worked together on many projects and initiatives since the very inception of the luxury project. Her incomparable knowledge of the luxury goods trades introduced me to a whole world of scholarly, curatorial knowledge of objects and artifacts; she has searched out most of the pictures for the book, and in her many kindnesses she has provided calm reassurance when I most needed it. John Robertson, husband and fellow historian, introduced me to David Hume, and delighted me with late-night laughter over passages in Mandeville and Vico. John read and criticized so many of my papers and articles that went into the making of the book, enjoyed my enthusiasms, but always reminded me that the real priority in life was ‘batting to leg with a smile’.The Chinese punchbowl with the cricket match is especially for him. Our daughters, Frances, Gabriel, and Jessie have responded admirably to too much luxury, too many distractions, and too little attention. But Gabriel thought ‘sweet commerce’ was a neat subject, so it was worth it. M.B. 1 January 2005

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Contents List of Figures List of Maps List of Tables

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Introduction Part I. Luxury, Quality, and Delight

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1. The Delights of Luxury 2. Goods from the East 3. Products of the Nation: On Art and Invention

21 46 85

Part II. How it was Made

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4. Glass and Chinaware: The Grammar of the Polite Table 5. Metal Things: Useful Devices and Agreeable Trinkets

117 154

Part III. A Nation of Shoppers

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6. Men and Women of the Middling Classes: Acquisitiveness and Self-Respect 7. ‘Shopping is a Place to Go’: Fashion, Shopping, and Advertising 8. Mercantile Theatres: British Commodities and American Consumers

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Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

332 357

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199 247

List of Figures Frontispiece. Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, 1774. Institute of Historical Research 2.1 Famille verte saucer dish, 1700 2.2 Palampore from India 2.3 Chinese traders in Nagasaki 2.4 Tea caddy, c.1740 2.5 Chinese punch bowl, c.1790 3.1 Knowledge, wit, and taste 3.2 Society of Arts premium: Miss Hannah Chambers 3.3 Patent specification: John Joseph Merlin, ‘Dutch Oven’ 4.1 A baluster cordial or toastmaster’s glass 4.2 Sir Thomas Samwell and his friends, c.1733 4.3 Josiah Wedgwood 4.4 Weekly wages of craftsmen, labourers, women, and young people in pottery manufacture 4.5 Punchbowl and stand 4.6 Routes by which pottery was taken out of Staffordshire 4.7 Jonathan Tyers and family, 1740 5.1 Portrait of Matthew Boulton 5.2 Designs for candlesticks 5.3 Designs for tea urns 5.4 Buckles 5.5 Boulton cut steel jewellery with Wedgwood blue jasper reliefs 5.6 Patent carriage steps 6.1 William Hutton 6.2 James Bisset 6.3 Birmingham: japanned tray 6.4 Arrival of the country relations, 1812 6.5 Cornelia Knight, writer and poet 6.6 Sir Robert Taylor 7.1 Wedgwood’s showroom on York Street

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vi 51 54 60 66 73 89 97 108 125 127 134 136 139 141 152 160 164 165 168 176 180 202 202 214 229 240 244 269

List of Figures 7.2 7.3 8.1 8.2 8.3

Trade card of James Wheeley paper hanging warehouse Trade card of Dunkerley & Cockings tin-plate workers Designs for escutcheons Samuels family, New England, 1788 Trade catalogue with Sheffield teapot, c.1800

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273 276 300 311 323

List of Maps 2.1 2.2 2.3 8.1

World trade routes, late eighteenth century Calico painting and printing in south India Japan, China, and South East Asia Eastern North America, 1690–1748

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48 63 65 292

List of Tables 2.1 Estimated EIC average textile imports, 1671–1760 2.2 English East India Company: peak years of imports of chinaware and porcelain 2.3 Patents for imitation goods and finishes, UK, 1700–1820 4.1 Prices of glasses 4.2 Wages paid by John Whieldon 1750–1751, 1760–1765 4.3 Charlotte Hammett’s Staffordshire & Glass Warehouse, Charleston, South Carolina, 1791 4.4 Costs of producing Wedgwood vases, 1772 4.5 John Wedgwood: selected sales and prices to china sellers, 1770 4.6 Prices of chinaware in John Willie’s Glass Workshop and Warehouse, 1809–1810 5.1 Wages of Birmingham and Sheffield metalworkers 5.2 Prices of Sheffield plate, 1796 5.3 Prices of iron and brass candlesticks and cutlery, 1793–1794 5.4 Local retailing, Birmingham and Sheffield 6.1 Ownership of goods, 1675–1725 6.2 Ownership of chinaware in Bristol and the nearby villages 6.3 Percentages of households with new goods: Kent and Cornwall, 1660–1749 6.4 Types of Goods left in wills: analysis by gender of testator, Birmingham and Sheffield, 1700–1800 8.1 Direction of England’s exports of manufactured goods, 1700–1773 8.2 Selected exports from England and Wales to Europe and North America, 1740–1780 8.3 City populations, North America and Britain 8.4 Exports of glass and earthenware from England and Wales to Europe and North America, 1741–1780 8.5 Exports of selected furniture from England and Wales to Europe and North America, 1740–1780 8.6 Goods categories advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1740–1790

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56 57 82 126 135 145 149 150 151 174 185 185 188 220 221 222 238 285 287 293 308 312 321

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Introduction On the night of 14 July 1791 Joseph Priestley, scientist, dissenting minister, and radical advocate of the principles of the French Revolution, rushed away with his wife, Mary, to shelter with friends. A Church and King mob thronged the road from Birmingham on the way to torch Priestley’s house. Shortly before this they had destroyed his church, the New Meeting House, in the town. Many of Birmingham’s leading dissenters had attended a dinner earlier in the day to celebrate the second anniversary of the French Revolution. But Priestley stayed at home, warned of the tension in the town, and that he would be a prime target. From a garden half a mile away the Priestleys watched under clear moonlight as furniture was thrown from the windows, scientific instruments broken, and books and manuscripts burned. One witness recalled that ‘the highroads for full half a mile of the house were strewed with books, and that on entering the library there was not a dozen volumes on the shelves, while the floor was covered several inches deep in torn manuscripts’. Eventually the house too was torched.The mob was soon on its way again, now to the Russells’ house, and both families together with friends retreated to the night-time roads in search of safety, returned to the house for a few hours before dawn, then left again as the rioters returned. Priestley left Birmingham for London later in the day; Mary went to their daughter, then stayed on with Samuel Galton’s family. The New Meeting House and Priestley’s home were the first of four meeting houses and twenty-seven homes to be attacked, all carefully selected to include those of the radical dissenters and their friends.¹ The possessions and their values that Priestley later listed for compensation before the Warwickshire assizes provide us with some insight into just ¹ Catherine Hutton, A Narrative of the Riots at Birmingham, July, 1791 (Birmingham, 1875), 5–22; S. H. Jeyes, The Russells of Birmingham in the French Revolution and in America 1791–1814 (London, 1911), 221–38.

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Introduction what a man of letters, a religious dissenter, a man of the middling classes living just outside one of Britain’s leading industrial towns owned and lived with as the eighteenth century drew to its close.² Priestley counted his losses in total at a value of £4,083 10s. 3d., with his household goods making up £1,307 8s. Eventually, two years later, he was compensated for £2,096 raised through the rates. The house was large enough to accommodate Priestley’s library and laboratory, as well as two small servants’ rooms and another small room in the attic. But the main accommodation was two bedrooms, a front and back parlour, a kitchen, and a storeroom. His possessions included large quantities of mahogany and japanned furniture, cotton window curtains, carpets, pier and swing looking glasses, tea urns and other tea equipment, large amounts of chinaware, silver-plated table, dessert, and tea spoons, cut glass, as well as smaller modern or fashionable items of ornament and display. Prominent among these furnishings was a range of quality consumer goods created, invented, and made fashionable over the course of the eighteenth century. The mahogany furniture included a knee-hole dressing table, a ladies’ work table, card tables, chairs, a dining table and tea tables, as well as a four-poster bed. The four-poster bed had cotton bed furnishings lined with calico muslin, and the value of the bed, its covers, and curtains was the princely sum of £25 10s.The smaller tables were valued at £1 5s., the dining table at £2 10s., and a set of eight mahogany chairs and two elbow chairs at £11 10s. There was a good deal of japanned ware—chairs, tea urns, plate warmers, trays, and tea boards. The window curtains in the two front bedrooms and the front parlour were cotton or calico with the substantial values £3 3s., £4 4s., and £6 6s. There were several looking glasses ranging in value from 16s. to £4 10s. There were colossal amounts of chinaware: valuable china ornaments in the parlour, a set of Nankeen table china of 108 pieces valued at £16 2s. Nankeen ware was a generic name for export ware porcelain imported from China. There were three sets of Wedgwood ware, green edged valued at £5 9s., blue edged valued at £4 4s., and a yellow set at £3 13s. There was Queen’s ware in the kitchen—three dozen plates and twelve dishes valued at £2 2s. There were several sets of tea china, including a Nankeen Tea set at £4 4s. There were punch bowls, coffee and tea pots, chocolate cups, sugar basins, coffee sets, sets of custard cups, dessert plates, and china plates. The silver ware included cream jugs and sugar tongs, as well as a set of eight tablespoons and four dessert spoons valued at £8 12s. There were various ² The Birmingham Riots, Inventory of the House and Goods of Joseph Priestley, 399801/IIR30, City Archives, Birmingham Central Library. I am grateful to Peter Jones for pointing out this source.

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Introduction types of glasses including cut glass cruets. There were patent princess metal candlesticks and snuffers. There were special branded goods and recent inventions: a Magellan timepiece, Wedgwood black inkstands, and a Boulton & Watt copying machine. There were new forms of ornamental ware and medallions: plated buckles, mourning buckles, and knee buckles; medallions of Priestley and Wilkinson, another medallion of Newton, and four different medallions of Franklin. A purse contained other medals and pocket pieces valued at 3 guineas. This inventory provides an arresting image of the material culture of an established middling-class intellectual at the end of the century. Priestley had married well, into the Wilkinson ironmaking family, and lived, if not on the same scale, with a similar type of furnishings, ornament, and tableware as the families of industrialists, merchants, and other intellectuals who formed his social circle and who no doubt assisted his support in Birmingham. The sum at which Priestley valued his losses was as high as the annual incomes of substantial aristocrats and the wealthiest group of gentry families. Leading merchants and industrialists could claim similar incomes. A superior clergyman (not including bishops) in 1803, when Colquhoun drew up his social tables, expected to earn £500; a lesser Anglican cleric and all dissenting ministers could expect only £120. Priestley’s income compared poorly with that of an average master manufacturer at £800, and with that of many lawyers who earned £350.³ Let us put these possessions in some perspective.The quantities of his possessions may surprise us now, the more so because Priestley was a radical and a dissenting minister. But the domestic interiors lived in by the elites and wealthier industrialists a hundred years before this were also full of furnishings and ornamental goods. In Whickham, on the north-east coalfield, rapid economic development in the later seventeenth century allowed the lesser gentry, prosperous yeomen, and the commercial and industrial middling sorts to accumulate numerous domestic possessions. The minor gentleman William Jackson lived in a sevenroom house crowded with furnishings: large numbers and various types of tables and chairs, curtained bedsteads, carpets, chests of drawers, pictures, and even a mirror and window curtains. He had large amounts of linen and pewter, iron, and brass utensils in his kitchen.⁴ It was not the quantities of domestic possessions to be found in the houses of the better-off middling classes that stand out between these two ³ Penny Corfield, Power and the Professions in England 1700–1850 (London, 1995), 234. ⁴ David Levine and Keith Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham 1560–1765 (Oxford, 1991), 241, 272.

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Introduction centuries, but the range, diversity, materials, closely identified types, and even brands of the goods. Priestley’s house had willow and Scotch carpets, his curtains were cotton, striped, Manchester or calico, his silverware was plated, he had cut glass, and Nankeen and Wedgwood chinaware, his furniture was mahogany and japanned, and there were tea urns, coffee and tea pots, plated buckles, and patent candlesticks. These were not goods passed down through generations, but new modern goods, displaying their patents, mechanized technologies, and new materials in fashionable style. The variety of their types and values also made at least some of them accessible to more ordinary middling groups and even to tradespeople and craftsmen in their times of prosperity. Though newly invented, and more available to the middling classes than were the luxury goods of the past, these items were still expensive, quality goods. The money spent on the Nankeen tea set valued at £4 4s. might have employed a female servant in Yorkshire for over a year.⁵ The set of mahogany dining-room chairs valued at £11 10s. was worth more than a year’s rent for a small London house in the eastern and southern suburbs suitable for better-off artisans.⁶ The mahogany tea table at £1 7s. might exchange for a fashionable cotton printed gown owned by one of the servants; indeed Sarah Rawlinson, Priestley’s maidservant, valued her chintz gown at £1 8s. But the four patent princess metal candlesticks were worth more; so were the two tea urns with plated cocks and heaters at between £2 10s. and £2 19s. The buckles and medals valued at between 9s. and £1 were equivalent to the weekly wage of a common London artisan.⁷ Priestley’s domestic possessions were Britain’s new luxuries, conveying modernity, refinement, and pleasure, not just among the elites, but among the middling classes. In the Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, an essay entitled ‘Of the Manners of the Age, as Refined by Luxury’ was published in 1772. Here the question was posed ‘What can be more universal than the effects of riches on manners in England?’ The answer was to be found in the commodities now available to ‘all ranks of the people’ who were ‘increasing in expense and endeavouring to vie with their superiors in the extent of it’. They had a ‘strong desire to signalise themselves in dress, equipage, houses, furniture, amusements etc.’. These things were signs of the ‘general effects of riches spreading through the people, and with them more polished manners’. The effects on the smaller middling and trades⁵ John Styles, ‘Involuntary Consumers? Servants and their Clothes in Eighteenth-Century England’, Textile History, 33/1 (2002), 2–21, p. 12. ⁶ Peter Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London (New Haven, 2004), 35. ⁷ Ibid. 35.

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Introduction people were immense: ‘their tables are served as well as those of rich merchants were an hundred years ago: their houses good and ornamented . . . the furniture strangely improved from the last age; in dress, see the sons and daughters tricked out in all the little ornaments . . . thousands of ribbons where packthread once sufficed. See the amusements of these people; they resort to their theatres and are busy in visits and tea drinking and cards; as much ceremony is found in the assembly of a country grocer’s wife as in that of a countess.’⁸ Luxury and Pleasure provides a history of those new consumer goods. Three sections of the book, ‘Luxury, Quality and Delight’, ‘How it was Made’, and ‘A Nation of Shoppers’, explore the cultural discourse and invention of the new goods, their manufacture and marketing, and who consumed them and how. It tells the stories and analyses the historical development that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries in the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to a new global trade in British new consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century. Many of our consumer goods of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, non-necessities, but nonetheless important material adjuncts to personal identities, cultural and symbolic display, and social interaction were luxuries to the people of the eighteenth century. They enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity, or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new wants. This unparalleled ‘product revolution’ provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a ‘new luxury’, one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the old elite and corrupt luxury. Statesmen and economists debated the impact of a dramatically intensified world commerce in such luxuries on their economies, national identities, and the behaviour and expectations of their common people. Where now the concept ‘consumer culture’ dominates social analysis of the West, and with globalization extends more frequently also to the East, in the eighteenth century commerce, luxury, and new products provided a parallel conceptual framework. Customers and shoppers, retailers and advertisers did not share the common political identity we recognize today as ‘consumers’, but they nevertheless engaged in a shared language of commerce, luxury, and products.⁹ Though a ‘consumer revolution’ may ⁸ Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, 50 (1772), 65–6. ⁹ This point is made in Frank Trentman, ‘Beyond Consumerism: New Historical Perspectives on Consumption’, Journal of Contemporary History, 39 (2004), 373–401.

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Introduction misconceive eighteenth-century European and even British societies, there is no denying the crest of products that rose on the ‘wave of gadgets’. Industrialization and commercial modernity in the eighteenth century was, above all, about consumer products. This was a ‘product revolution’ made by inventors and manufacturers, merchants, retailers and advertisers, and above all by the people who bought ‘new luxury’. The new products were not the endless stuff of questionable taste that darkened Victorian parlours.They were the material products of enlightenment and modernity, of fashion and global commerce. Montesquieu, the Anglophile French philosopher, praised the commerce, gentle and sweet, that ‘polishes and softens barbarous mores, as we see every day’.The leading Scottish philosopher David Hume endorsed ‘innocent luxury’; this ‘refinement in home manufactures’ provided both the ‘pleasures of luxury’ and the ‘profits of commerce’.¹⁰ The new products proclaimed their modernity by their imitative materials and their advanced manufacturing systems. Such systems frequently meant mechanization, though for much of the eighteenth century little of this was powered by steam; it sometimes meant large-scale workshops and even factories, but it always meant division of labour either within one workplace or outsourced to many. The products were high design, invoking ‘art and industry’; quality went with price competitiveness, and the middling classes bought them not because they were cheap, but because they were fashion leaders. That fashion leadership was, for some parts of the middling and elite classes, an access to ‘polite’ and genteel society. Some of the goods were what John Styles has called ‘indispensable props in the genteel performances that constituted politeness, whether in the dining room or the assembly room. Your gentility was judged by whether you owned the right items, whether they were sufficiently genteel in their design, and whether you were capable of using them in the right way.’¹¹ But a product development that assumed revolutionary proportions went much broader and deeper than polite society. It extended to the satirical inversion of genteel polite society and middling-class respectability in the demi-monde of London’s theatres and the sexual subculture of the city’s libertines, mistresses, and prostitutes. The mistress, who even more than a wife was an object of conspicuous consumption, won with ‘fine buckles and ¹⁰ Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, ‘On Commerce’, Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (De l’esprit des lois, 1748), trans. A. M. Cohler (Cambridge, 1989), book 20, ch. 1, p. 338; David Hume, ‘Of Commerce’ (1752), in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), 265. ¹¹ John Styles, ‘Georgian Britain 1714–1837: Introduction’, in Michael Snodin and John Styles (eds.), Design and the Decorative Arts: Britain 1500–1900 (London, 2001), 157–85, p. 184.

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Introduction beautiful china’, might take the ‘harlot’s progress’, trading her trappings for the Bridewell jail.¹² The profusion of products decorated the new housing terraces and tenements of England’s and Scotland’s growing towns and cities; it ornamented the bodies of tradesmen and women who lodged there, and of journeymen, apprentices, and even at times of the itinerant labouring poor who sheltered in their rented rooms and back quarters. Indeed fostering a taste for the new goods became part of the discourse of moral reformers who sought the social improvement of the labouring poor.They believed that those among the labouring poor who sought the accoutrements of tea drinking, fashionable clothing, and better furnishings joined in the wider commercial improvement in contrast to their fellows caught in a vicious cycle of gin drinking, idleness, and poverty.¹³ The new consumer products were international, quickly becoming global commodities: Birmingham buckles on French shoes, Sheffield forks and knives in Connecticut and Barbados, Staffordshire chinaware on AngloIndian tables. The product revolution took shape as it did in the framework of the global economy. A pre-existing global trade in consumer luxuries from Asia and the Caribbean stimulated Britain’s own manufacture of distinctive British products. Manufacturers and entrepreneurs, ready to exploit the opportunity offered of potential markets, created British consumer products capable both of delighting domestic buyers and of seducing foreign princes and merchants. This product revolution and the brand of goods it carried into global trade was British. Most of these better-quality goods were manufactured mainly in England, but many were made with Welsh iron and copper, or they were sold with prominent Scots linens and fine cottons. The goods were carried out to the rest of the world by merchants from Glasgow and Swansea as well as Bristol, Liverpool, and London. Itinerant Scots pedlars carried these wares into Polish parlours and New England farmsteads. Scots army captains in Madras and East India Company private traders in Canton bought British. The ‘British identity’ acquired by the new products was, to be sure, a part of that wider development of Britishness in the eighteenth century, defined above all by war against the French. British historians sometimes see this ‘national identity’ as English, and sometimes as British. It is, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an ‘imagined community’; the Great Britain that brought together England, Scotland, and Wales was, as ¹² John Brewer, Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2004), 143; Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven, 1999), 93–100. ¹³ Jonathan White, ‘The “Slow but Sure Poyson”: The Representation of Gin and its Drinkers, 1736–1751’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), 35–64, p. 54.

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Introduction Linda Colley argues, forged by war and entrenched by empire.¹⁴ Opposition to the French and Catholicism provided one way of making connections among peoples of the British Isles. But identities were also made in trade and empire, in facing the ‘otherness’ of different civilizations and cultures. When Macartney led the first diplomatic mission to China in 1793 he and the members of his expedition defined their common Britishness in the hostility between two self-declared superior civilizations. From this time, British participants in empire, both at home and abroad, defined themselves against differences in creed, race and ‘conditions of life’.¹⁵ Those conditions of life were about the goods. The goods taken out to other parts of the world represented the power of the nation; they also provided a defining material identity to those trading, travelling, and living far from their homes. More and better goods conveyed economic improvement. Britishness, in the century leading up to this confrontation with China, conveyed both commerce and commodities produced in the British Isles and her colonies. The Scots perceived their Britishness as a route to liberty and economic modernity. Their Union with England in 1707 ‘liberated’ them from archaic institutions, and allowed them full access to the markets of empire.¹⁶ The Scots would gain from a union of trade.Their own manufactures would improve and sell on world markets. Their own consumption of decencies and even luxuries might be provided to advantage from within the British Isles, shifting tastes from high-priced French imports to more ‘commodious’, recently invented, and certainly cheaper British alternatives. The economic modernity the Scots sought in the Union was, therefore, not just about trade and industry; it was also about goods, consumption, and ‘conditions of life’. The greatest theorists of British economic improvement, David Hume and Adam Smith, Scots who also saw themselves as British, linked commerce, manufacture, and commodities.¹⁷ Our recent historical concern with ‘identity’—personal, social, and national—may be anachronistic, more a concern of present preoccupations ¹⁴ Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History 1740–1820 (London, 1997), 51–6, 154; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, 1992), 1–9; 56–71. ¹⁵ Linda Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, Journal of British Studies, 31 (Oct. 1992), 309–29, pp. 309–10. ¹⁶ Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–1839 (Cambridge, 1993), 268–9. ¹⁷ Roy Porter’s book on the English Enlightenment, Enlightenment (London, 2002), gives a central place to Hume and Smith in his ‘English’ story.

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Introduction than of eighteenth-century ways of looking at the world,¹⁸ but there is no doubt that goods from Britain came with particular associations. They sold in Europe, the wider world, and at home with the image of Britannia, who represented liberty and commerce. She cast aside the old props of traditional society, modernizing government and trade. She nourished the national arts; the goods she sent out to the world were not ‘French fancies’ or aristocratic luxuries, but new modern commodities.¹⁹ The eighteenth century is the defining moment in the history of consumer culture in the West. Neil McKendrick claimed for it a ‘consumer revolution’ coinciding with the classic period of the industrial revolution from 1760 to 1820. He identified it with an explosion of new goods and a spirit of emulation which stimulated people to buy these commodities. Britain’s greater and more evenly distributed wealth than her neighbours and her relatively open society provided the opportunity for more to partake in this benevolent revolution. McKendrick linked consumption to modernity and both to industrialization. Historians immediately found fault with a concept that tried to say too much, and it went the way of so many revolutions, deconstructed to the extent of denial of any significant discontinuity.²⁰ The theoretical framework for the consumer revolution was set in economic theories of the origins of economic growth and neoliberal theories of capitalism and democracy prevalent in the 1960s. Prominent social scientists then believed that high mass consumption of consumer durables was the end result of a long-standing success story of Western economic growth and industrialization.²¹ Many historians, however, denied the premisses of the model. Standards of living for most of the population during the eighteenth century did not rise fast enough to sustain a ‘consumer revolution’; if ¹⁸ Colin Kidd,‘Identity before Identities: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Historian’, in Julia Rudolph (ed.), History and Nation (Lewisburg, Pa., forthcoming). ¹⁹ Maxine Berg, ‘French Fancy and Cool Britannia: The Fashion Markets of Early Modern Europe’, Proceedings of the Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica ‘F. Datini’ (Prato), 32 (2001), 519–56. J. R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot, 1998), esp. pp. 175–204, and Carolyn Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-Century Paris (London, 1996), esp. pp. 113–43, explore the enthusiasm among the French for the technological achievement and fashion ascendancy of this new kind of British luxury. ²⁰ Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society:The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982), 9–33; B. A. Holderness, ‘The Birth of a Consumer Society’, English Historical Review, 99 (1984), 122–4; John Styles, ‘Manufacturing, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), esp. pp. 535–42. ²¹ John Brewer, ‘The Error of our Ways’, Lecture to the Cultures of Consumption Programme, The Royal Society, 23 Sept. 2003, Working Paper No. 12, www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/publications.html.

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Introduction anything incomes for most of the population declined. Economic historians whittled away at estimates of economic growth, and condemned a sluggish manufacturing sector where cotton manufacturing eventually emerged as a lone and fortuitous star.²² This so-called ‘consumer revolution’ was surely no more than a panegyric to metropolitan elites ‘puffed’ by the advertisers from overextended newspaper and periodical proprietors. Other historians, often isolated or working against the grain, slowly but doggedly gathered evidence in wills and probate inventories from right across the country of increasing accumulations and a greater diversity of possessions across large groups of relatively ordinary and modest middlingclass people. There were more goods, more people bought them, and many of them were not necessaries, but superfluous, either decencies or luxuries. But discovering more goods in the eighteenth century led others to push the frontiers back earlier and further afield. Historians working across many different countries or different historical periods identified more sophisticated material cultures than in earlier generations and claimed priority for the first consumer revolution or the birth of consumer society. A ‘consumer society’ with widespread new spending patterns, advertising, and retailing already prevailed in the seventeenth century. Historians of Ming China and Renaissance Italy identified vibrant consumer cultures before this, and archaeologists discovered specialized shops and exotic market emporia in ancient Greece and Rome.²³ As John Brewer has argued, too many historians were more concerned to claim disciplinary or national priority than to ask why we were seeking the origins of consumer society. The impact of claims to ‘we were there first’ has been to flatten out change, and to deny what was really distinctive about the consumer goods and patterns of their consumption in various countries and historical periods.²⁴ Many of the accounts of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century consumer revolutions assumed a pre-industrial past or simple consumer needs and a moral economy of customary rather than commercial relations. Evidence gathered of long²² For summaries of these positions see C. H. Feinstein, ‘Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998), 625–58; N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985). ²³ Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978); Jan de Vries, ‘Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods, 85–132, gathers together this wide-ranging research into the increase in possessions over the early modern period. On other early consumer experiences see Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge, 1991) and Richard Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1993). ²⁴ Brewer, ‘The Error of our Ways’.

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Introduction standing global consumer cultures undermined these assumptions, but the real challenge was to connect evidence of consumer goods and consumption to wider historical processes. If we go back to the eighteenth century, what was it about the goods and their consumers that connected to wider economic change? Jan de Vries in the early 1990s took up the cause of the consumer revolution once again, arguing that in spite of static standards of living, ordinary people did buy more; they were especially attracted by fashionable and luxury goods.They gave up necessaries and worked harder, or in other ways to gain more cash income so that they could buy these things. In working harder and more frequently in the market economy, in giving up time spent in household management and provisioning they simultaneously provided the labour forces for new industries. Their consumption thereby contributed to the origins of industrialization through changes in the household and labour force. Now households both bought and provided the labour for new domestically produced goods which imitated the characteristics of former globally traded luxuries.²⁵ This reconfiguration of consumption from needs to desires coincides with the move in our own priorities since the 1980s. The branding revolution depicted in Naomi Klein’s No Logo (2000) showed the extent to which consumer taste in the West has recently shifted away from mass consumption to designer goods. The concept of luxury, once associated with the super-rich, now features commonly in the language of advertising. Lifestyle choices, distinction, diversity, and individuality are now major priorities of consumerism. The Western affluence that underpins these values is set in a framework of globalization. Indeed, consumption is a key marker of inclusion and exclusion as set out in United Nations development reports and social surveys on poverty. Social scientists now seek measures of the ‘quality of life’ and comparative measures of amenities rather than calories. Perception of social division within Western economies is now about a division of consumer cultures as much as it is about incomes, wealth, and employment. Membership of European, American, and even global trading communities and networks is about much more than international marketing agreements; it is also about accessing perceived higher standards of living, even ‘world-class’ social amenities. This includes individual access to designer and fashion goods whose production and marketing frameworks are indeed global, with production outsourced to Asia and the biggest potential markets being developed in South-East Asia and China. This is a salutary reminder of the very close parallels between our current globalization and the ²⁵ De Vries, ‘Between Purchasing Power’, esp. pp. 107–21.

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Introduction global framework of Britain’s consumer products at the very genesis of her industrialization. Britain’s new consumer products in the eighteenth century also arose in a context of wider world trade; a global trade in newly discovered luxuries from Asia and the Americas as well as an older trade with Europe opened tastes to a different material culture from that which had gone before. This global framework stimulated the British manufacture of new alternative consumer goods which sometimes copied, but more significantly ‘imitated’, the spirit of global luxury.²⁶ Such new products were also technological achievements. Made with new materials, fabricated with novel production methods deploying the division of labour and all manner of hand, horse, water-powered, and eventually steam-powered machinery, they were the success story of an industrial revolution.They, in turn, were global products, taking their British brand to the Americas, the empire, and the rest of Europe. While social and cultural historians, literary scholars, and even social scientists regard the eighteenth century as the turning point in the rise of consumer society, associating consumption with modernity, they write remarkably little about the material reality of that society. As JeanChristophe Agnew has argued, ‘the world of goods’ has become entirely cut off from the work that made it. Those concepts once associated with the analysis of the material world, ‘production’, ‘fabrication’, indeed ‘craft’, ‘capital’, and ‘work’ have become the metaphors of cultural representation.²⁷ Despite the intense historical and literary investigation of aspects of eighteenth-century consumer culture over recent decades we still have incorporated into our wider histories very little about the products people were buying. Research on the material goods is divided off into the specialism either of museum curators and arts researchers, or of the archaeologists and anthropologists who have inspired material culture studies. The focus of the museum product-based research is design styles as well as individual objects and their provenance, objects which have been collected because they are the best of their kind or the top end of the market.²⁸ Alternatively, as material culture the products become objects in a ‘vernacular’ ²⁶ Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 182 (2004), 85–142. ²⁷ Jean-Christophe Agnew, ‘Coming up for Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods, 19–39, p. 30. ²⁸ One of the best examples of a history of design and social responses is centred on the collections at the V&A, London. See Snodin and Styles (eds.), Design and the Decorative Arts. On the history of objects in a museum context see I. Karp and S. D. Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures:The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, 1990).

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Introduction style.²⁹ As historians we do know about the symbolic values of particular goods, and about the numbers of goods featuring in the inventories of various groups across the social spectrum. We know about the shopping proclivities of a few elites, about polite social behaviour, about cultural goods, and about the literary representation of nearly all of this. This history of eighteenth-century consumer culture is, however, almost completely disconnected from the study of the material world of consumption. It is either so rarified that the commodity becomes just another way of discussing our personal identity, or the generic product is itself simply a ‘by-product’ of industrial development. Actual products, what they were, how they were designed and made, what they were used for, get lost in this dichotomy between the cultural and the economic. We need a history of those new consumer goods that inspired fashion desire and transformed the domestic spaces of the eighteenth-century household. Priestley’s elegant furnishings and delightful ornament found their counterparts down the social scale. Special, refined, and sought-out consumer goods were set apart by all social groups from their necessities. Items of convenience and display and intricate inventive modernity meant far more than the mundane articles of the everyday.The furniture, carpets, chinaware, glass, silver-plated ware, candlesticks, and brass locks and furniture handles which we have come to connect with eighteenth-century interiors and Georgian houses became identifiably British over the course of the century.The stamped buttons, plated buckles, and commemorative medals that provided the smart accessories to men’s and women’s dress were sought out as British adornments and tokens of esteem. These were the new ornamental and decorative goods that came to compete with and to take over from the exotic luxuries of the global emporium. In London’s new shopping streets in Piccadilly, St James’s, and the Haymarket were to be found a whole range of new and fashionable British goods: Wedgwood’s creamware and ornamental vases had their own well-appointed gallery. Other shops showed off Sadler & Green’s new transfer-printed earthenware. Matthew Boulton showcased at Christie’s and Ansell’s in Pall Mall his newly invented and latest design silver plate tea urns and candlesticks, and his fashion luxury ormolu and blue john, or cut steel jewellery. Cut glass chandeliers and glasses glittered in front of large mirrors lit by patent lamps, and nearby in Piccadilly cabinetmakers, upholsterers, and upholders sold mahogany and ²⁹ On the American schoool of material culture studies see Thomas J. Schlereth (ed.), Material Culture Studies in America (Nashville, 1982), and Catherine E. Hutchins (ed.), Everyday Life in the Early Republic (Winterthur, Del., 1994).

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Introduction veneered dining and tea tables, and displayed the clever locks and springs of their ladies’ desks and dressing tables. These goods were made in Britain; they were modern in design; they were made with the latest tools, machinery, and chemical processes: they were intriguing imitations of former craft and oriental luxuries. They delighted spectators and buyers, and were specifically sought out for their new designs and technologies. ‘New invented’ became a descriptor of British goods. Benjamin Franklin, visiting London in 1758, sent his wife some cotton ‘printed curiously from Copper Plates, a new Invention’.³⁰ Another visitor to London in the early 1780s described its streets as a show cabinet of art and industry with ingenious novelties, paintings, machines, and precious objects displayed behind great clear-glass windows. Shop windows vied with electrical demonstrations and popular science lectures on optics and hydraulics. The new domestic and decorative goods from machinewoven carpets and copper-plate printed curtains to stamped brassware and pinchbeck, japanned snuff boxes, steel buttons, and pocket watches declared modernity, enlightenment, and fashion. Reinhold Angerstein, the Swedish industrial spy who wrote and drew his way round England in the mid-1750s, reported back to his government and transcribed in his diary detailed drawings and descriptions of the new machines that stamped buttons or pressed out teacup handles and endless other mechanisms, most turned by hand or horse power where the British, even at this stage, excelled over the rest of Europe.³¹ Adam Smith noticed the curious fascination of his countrymen for ingenious trinkets and toys conveying convenience and utility. James Bisset, the Birmingham ‘toymaker’, the contemporary term for a manufacturer of small ornamental metalware, rescued himself from homelessness and debt as a young journeyman by his new invention of painted glass ornament.³² Edward Thomason, son of the Birmingham bucklemaker, assiduously invented all manner of improved consumer goods. He was especially proud of his patented retractable carriage steps and his ‘patent ne plus-ultra Corksrew’. These were followed by his sliding toasting fork made in silver, gilt, plated, and brass, and his sliding hearth brushes in the same material, but with a case of papier mâché. His show shop with its expensive gadgets ensnared the unwary, first captivated on a tour around his modern manufac³⁰ Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1991), 109. ³¹ R. R. Angerstein’s Illustrated Travel Diary, 1753–1755: Industry in England and Wales from a Swedish Perspective, trans. Torsten and Peter Berg (London, 2001), 35, 341. ³² Memoir of James Bisset: Written by Himself, ed. T. B. Dudley (1818; Birmingham, 1904).

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Introduction tory.³³ Mrs Montagu well before this took pleasure in her visit to the Soho Manufactory, where she saw beautiful objects of exquisite taste and was intrigued by the admirable inventions and secrets of chemistry and mechanic powers she found there.³⁴ A burgeoning middling class extending from professionals, merchants, and industrialists to ordinary trades people and artisans embraced these new consumer goods with the modernity, politeness, respectability, and independence they conveyed.They were to be had in a seemingly infinite variety of designs, qualities, and prices—what mattered was the look, elegance, and price. Dorothy Ridgeway, a wealthy Sheffield spinster, bequeathed her silver ornament, table and tea ware, and her best set of ‘nantz’ (or Chinese export porcelain) china to her nieces. Her poor counterpart, Elizabeth Lynes, a Birmingham toymaker, left to her daughter a silver snuff box among her modest furnishings and best clothes. Joseph Marks left a will in Bristol in 1746 with assets at less than £50, but he owned chinaware and chocolate cups,a teapot, a pier glass, a clock and case, a japanned cupboard, and five silver teaspoons.³⁵ William Taylor, a mid-century London butcher, when set uponby robbers on his way to work one morning, lost a fustian frock coat withtwelve plate buttons valued at 40s., silver shoe buckles valued at 60s., and aperiwig valued at 10s., among other clothing.³⁶ A treasured silver snuff box passed down to a beloved daughter or a fashionable display of gleaming andsparkling buttons and buckles on a prosperous tradesman conveyed an emotional connection to new semi-luxury commodities, goods saved for, prized, and displayed among the tradespeople and artisans. Here we explore the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. We can follow these goods, from teaware and metal ornament (or ‘toys’) to small items of fashion furnishings as they were used and displayed in the private domestic spaces of Britain’s urban middling classes. The language associated with these goods at the time conveyed aspirations for a new kind of consumption—one focused on modern and fashionable products. Their key ³³ Sir Edward Thomason’s Memoirs during Half a Century (London, 1845), i. 10, 14, 15. On the shopper’s experience see ‘Bodmer’s Diary, 1816–17’ in W. O. Henderson, Industrial Britain under the Regency: The Diaries of Escher, Bodmer, May and de Gallois 1814–18 (London, 1968), 81, cited in Giorgio Riello and P. K. O’Brien, ‘Reconstructing the Industrial Revolution: Analyses, Perceptions and Conceptions of Britain’s Precocious Transition to Europe’s First Industrial Society’ (unpublished paper, 2003), 18. ³⁴ Letters between Matthew Boulton and Elizabeth Montagu, 31 Oct. 1771 to 23 Jan. 1773, Matthew Boulton Papers, 330/331. ³⁵ Carl B. Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England: Cultural Ties and Social Spheres in the Provinces 1660–1780 (Manchester, 1998), 128. ³⁶ Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: The English Clothing Trade before the Factory 1660–1800 (London, 1997), 130.

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Introduction words were ‘ingenuity’,‘imitation’,‘convenience and utility’,‘taste and style’, and above all, ‘delight’. That proliferation of new commodities, which we have come to know as the consumer revolution, was not just a concept; it was real products. My book sets out the characteristics of the products, their diversity and qualities, how they were made and in what volumes, how they were bought and what prices people paid for them, and above all why they were desired across various consumer groups. We need to know more about these goods—which of them were new, why they were attractive, which were fashionable, which mundane, and how people invented and responded to them. The making of these goods was also their consumption. As The Wealth of Nations declared, ‘Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.’ We thus follow the consumers of these goods, how they bought their new commodities and incorporated them into their lifestyles. How did they endow the new goods with fashion and make shopping for them into a national pastime? Above all, how was it that the new consumer goods were so quickly and effectively branded British, and became world-class commodities by the last third of the eighteenth century? The markets for new consumer goods were made at home and in the empire, and especially in the American colonies. Success in these Atlantic markets reinforced markets at home and also made them fashion and brand leaders throughout Europe.

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Part I








Luxury, Quality, and Delight 

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Buying and selling possessions, commodities, and new goods directed the activity, occupied the mind, and infatuated the emotions of Britain’s rapidly expanding middling classes in the eighteenth century. Their restless pursuit of novelty and the gratification of anticipated pleasure were juxtaposed with a need for respect and stability. Getting wealth was also about spending it, and Britain’s urban middling classes led the shifts in material culture which also swept through elite households and transformed the habits of the labouring poor. They saved for domestic possessions, selected these, exercised taste in their choices. These were not the basic household tools of everyday life, bought out of necessity not choice. Nor were they the expensive ornament of public display conveying dynasty or national power. The new domestic possessions became consumer goods—teaware and dinner services, glassware, japanned tea tables, boxes, cabinets, and trays, plated tea urns, coffee pots, brass and silver candelabra, cutlery and stamped brassware, and fancy steelware, buckles, buttons and medallions, upholstered furnishings, and carpets. The subject of intense, introspective, and uncomfortable reflection, these new domestic goods were imported or produced in sprawling industrial villages, urban workshops, and rural factories.Their purchasers regarded them as luxuries, the superfluous commodities beyond basic needs. Luxury goods, and wider social access to these, set the framework for the invention of the new domestic commodities which were to become British consumer goods. Policy-makers analysed the economic advantages of a more broadly based consumption of superfluities, overruling the moralists preoccupied with the social dislocation and moral corruption attendant on luxury consumption. Writers, social investigators, and politicians debated the impact of desires for novelties, luxuries, and new addictive goods on the lives of ordinary people. They embraced the civility and manners that went with the greater adornment of middling-class domestic interiors and dress. Thus luxuries, formerly negatively associated with foreign imports, gave way to consumer goods conveying national identity. Markets for new domestic and decorative commodities evolved in responses to luxury goods imported from the East. These imported exotic luxuries, which provoked such anxiety among statesmen and economic policy-makers, enchanted British and European buyers with the access they ~ 19 ~

Luxury, Quality, and Delight offered to a higher, more civilized way of life. Asian luxury goods were brought into Europe in unprecedented quantities by the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century East India companies. Silks and printed calicoes, blue and white porcelain, and lacquered cabinets captivated European shoppers. Eastern production of these goods for Western markets revealed technical and marketing sophistication for a new category of luxury goods which could be produced in quantity and variety without sacrificing quality and delight. Marketing these goods in Europe through auctions, toy shops, chinaware and goldsmith shops, and pedlars paved the way for retailing new British goods. The ultimate effect of the extensive importation of these exotic consumer goods was to stimulate new thinking about domestic possessions. Manufacturers and consumers sought to design and style luxury and semi-luxury consumer goods for a civilized way of life. That design and style was pursued through aspiration to a special eighteenth-century virtue, ‘imitation’. Adam Smith called imitation a ‘source of wonder’. Manufacturers and craftsmen sought to ‘imitate’ Eastern luxury; they reacted to the techniques, materials, and design of ornamental goods brought from Asia, absorbing some of these, adapting others, and developing the principles of what they saw to develop an occidental material culture of household possessions and ornament. They aspired to match Asian ability to produce and distribute a highly diverse range of goods for large urban and middling-class markets right across the world. They adapted concepts and material to taste and design, accessible resources, and distinctive technologies. They connected art and technology to make new, desirable, British products. They understood the gratification provided by luxury expenditure and the appeal of the cornucopia of global trade. A rapidly growing middling class avid for fashion, modernity, individuality, variety, and choice sought out new products, invented and embellished them, and took delight in their consumer experiences. The goods they bought were aesthetically appealing and produced with modern techniques and materials. They were not associated with aristocratic excess, but with civility, taste, and moderation. A new ‘economy of quality and delight’ pervaded these goods. Britain was so successful at inventing and producing them for wide international markets that new consumer goods took on a British identity. The quality semi-luxury ware now associated with Britain stimulated an ‘anglomanie’ in world markets from the last half of the eighteenth century for English ‘modern luxury’.

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1


The Delights of Luxury The Wants of the Mind are infinite, Man naturally Aspires, and as his Mind is elevated, his Senses grow more refined, and more capable of Delight.¹

An Economy of Quality Luxury and novelty were of special significance to eighteenth-century consumers. Even among very ordinary people, the key incentive to changing consumer and household behaviour was provided by the prospect of novelties, luxuries, or new addictive goods such as sugar and tea. Wider social access to these goods over the course of the eighteenth century set the terms for the introduction of new consumer goods. Eighteenth-century consumers perceived these new goods, from fashion fabrics to tea tables, from steel buttons to fine chinaware, as ‘luxuries’; manufacturers, merchants, and shopkeepers developed, advertised, and sold them as a part of the economy of quality and delight. But their characteristics also distinguished them from more traditional luxuries. Luxuries, formerly negatively associated with foreign imports and with elite ostentatious display, gave way to consumer goods identified with middling-class domestic interiors and dress. Distinctive British consumer goods connected the middling classes to an economy extolling the virtues of quality, delight, fashion and taste, comfort and convenience, and variety and imitation. Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments noted the curious fascination of his countrymen for ingenious trinkets and toys. ‘What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it. All their pockets are stuffed with little conveniences. They contrive new pockets, unknown in the clothes of other ¹ Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse on Trade (1690).

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight people, in order to carry a greater number.’² These useful and agreeable contrivances stuffed into the pockets of eighteenth-century trend-setters for easy accessibility and display conveyed modernism and mechanical progress to their beholders. Their owners were benefiting from the opportunities made out of the broader markets and spending power perceived by Daniel Defoe in the years just before his death. Defoe, prolific pamphleteer, social and economic commentator, novelist, indeed veritable pundit of his age, described his country in 1731 as ‘populous, rich, fruitful; the Way of living large, luxurious, vain and expensive’. The ‘trading, middling sort of people . . . are the life of our whole commerce . . . it is by their expensive, generous, free way of living, that the home consumption is rais’d to such a bulk, as well of our own, as of foreign production.’³ These two great analysts of their age identified two cultural and social principles which were to have a profound effect on the economy: a delight in modern mechanical technique and a proclivity for luxury expenditure. Why did political thinkers and commercial writers at the time engage in such vigorous debate over luxury? Social commentators had long seen the passion for material goods, and especially for luxuries, as one of the corrupting forces in society; but they also perceived luxury as a vice with public benefits. Mandeville, early in the century, argued that the pleasures of some kept others in employment and encouraged trade. A Dutchman who made his home in England, Mandeville also found these features in those two northern Protestant countries. Montesquieu by the middle of the century thought this kind of material acquisitiveness a virtue, as a civilizing medium; it promoted ‘le doux commerce’, sweet commerce.⁴ Was Montesquieu speaking only for his countrymen? In fact he was expressing admiration for British commerce and for a social and political structure in Britain which he believed gave more people access to superfluous commodities. While luxury goods and quality manufacture have always been associated with the French economy and culture, there has been little place for these as serious subjects for understanding the sources of economic growth in Britain. Yet in Britain too, the desire for luxuries, and for the new consumer goods that these goods became over the course of the eighteenth century, was to be one of the prime

² Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; 1790), ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. McFie (Oxford, 1976), Book IV, chap. 1, p. 180. ³ Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (London, 1728), 144. ⁴ Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714), ed. Philip Harth (Harmondsworth, 1970); Montesquieu, Esprit des lois.

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The Delights of Luxury movers of economic change, and indeed must be counted as one of the spurs to industrialization. It was the demand for distinctive, delightful objects of possession, and the production in Britain of enough of these to meet a rapidly growing and socially diversified demand, which provided the basis for commercialization. The key to this development was the inspiration in design, variety, and aesthetic quality provided by Eastern or oriental luxuries. Manufacturers and inventors practised an eighteenth-century concept of imitation; eighteenthcentury designers and consumers adopted ‘imitation’ as a principle of taste; these developments yielded what we would today call product innovation. The commercialization of luxury thus provides an important part of the story of invention during the eighteenth century. The demand for the superfluous, the convenient, the new and luxurious has not, hitherto, been the way into understanding economic change during the eighteenth century, nor the springs of industrialization. What were the ‘baubles and trinkets’ to which Adam Smith attached such cultural and social appeal? The new rich and the urban middling classes bought these ‘modern luxuries’, filling the bare rooms of town houses and new-built terraces. Country gentry and aristocrats extended and refurbished county seats, and set about a great spate of country house building. They wanted modern luxury furnishings and ornament. The part played by such consumer goods in provoking economic change has a rarefied, and often obscure, place in explanations of the eighteenthcentury economy and society, but should be significant even to industrialization itself. In our own day anthropologists and cultural theorists have addressed connections between consumer goods and the taste for luxury expenditure. Consumerism was also the subject of continuous debate among those in the eighteenth century who wrote on the concept of luxury. Ideas had a material context in the public and private settings of luxury and consumer goods in the early modern period, from courts and salons to urban domestic housing. New, more inclusive ideas of luxury and an appeal to taste and fashion stimulated product innovation and invention. When Adam Smith recognized the admiration for utility and fitness to be found in baubles, trinkets, and trivial things, he put together those characteristics of technique and luxury which were to inspire manufacturing and new consumer products in eighteenth-century Britain.The arts of imitation were combined with the science of invention. Britain’s new consumer goods were about new materials and products, from varnish to lighting, from colours and pattern to a whole array of articles made in stamped brass and other alloys. The middling classes, lesser gentry, and urban consumers took ~ 23 ~

Luxury, Quality, and Delight delight in such fine consumer goods; they first imported them, then produced their own adapted and imitative versions. The new luxury and semiluxury things were items of personal or household adornment in distinctive materials and styles. The new materials were lightweight cottons instead of silks, earthenwares instead of porcelain, flint and cut glass, metal alloys and finishes such as gilt and silver plate, stamped brassware, japanned tinware and papier mâché, ormolu and cut steel instead of gold and silver, varnishes and veneers instead of exotic woods. Manipulating these new materials was an act of invention itself, yielding new decorative metalwares, ceramics and glass, light furnishings, and clocks and watches. These goods were modern and innovative; they were the new luxuries and semi-luxuries of Britain’s rapidly rising, socially heterogeneous towns and cities. The new commodities were not simply replacements of goods formerly made at home.They were special items of personal or household adornment in distinctive materials and styles. They frequently evoked the exotic, and they borrowed from the impact of the Asian luxury imports which first started to arrive on any scale from the later seventeenth century. Indian calicoes, Chinese porcelain, and Japanese lacquers transformed the visual culture of Europe.⁵ Some of these goods were fine luxury products, but especially in the case of Indian calicoes and even of porcelain, they were brought into Britain in quantities and at prices which made them available to a discerning middling class. Their key attribute was their availability in a range of patterns, styles, qualities, and prices. They could thus appeal to markets ranging from the middling orders of the metropolis and provinces to elite consumers. They unpicked the uniformity and clear social hierarchies previously imposed by sumptuary legislation, and made individuality and variety an option to much broader parts of society. European monarchs and aristocrats from ancient times imported these Asian luxuries, via the Mediterranean and across the long and difficult silk route to China; in early modern times they traded through Lisbon and Antwerp for goods brought in on Portuguese and later Dutch carracks taking the long sea route around the Cape of Africa discovered by Vasco da Gama in 1498. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries heavy investment in new East India trading companies by the Dutch, then the British, the French, the Danes, and the Swedes brought to Europe not only spices and silks, but large cargoes of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, ⁵ Chandra Mukerji, From Graven Images: Patterns of Modern Materialism (New York, 1983), 182–92; Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite.

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The Delights of Luxury lacquerware, small furnishings, wallpapers, and fans, Indian calicoes and muslins, brass and bronze ornaments. Sumptuary law, which dictated who might own, wear, and display certain luxury goods, had been imposed in varying degrees across the ancient and early modern world to curb conspicuous consumption, especially among the lower social orders. The purpose of such legislation was to reinforce social divisions and to maintain social stability. The rapid spread of new products had, by the eighteenth century, undermined any serious prospect of enforcing such laws in most parts of Europe. Asian producers had an amazing capacity to satisfy a new luxury market which was both growing rapidly and increasing in social diversity. What Britain’s luxury and new consumer goods manufacturers and retailers learned from their Asian predecessors was the need to meet desires for individuality, self-differentiation, and luxury by means of visual diversity, and the possibilities of efficient cost-cutting techniques for doing so. Few historians consider the place made by these goods in the broader consumer cultures of the eighteenth century, nor their economic impact.We use frameworks which address the place of mass or standardized consumer goods, of ordinary things or even of populuxe goods. But the consumer goods considered here were not just an early stage of mass consumer goods, nor were they cheap versions of aristocratic luxury goods. The ideas of mass markets and mass production systems spring from the Fordism of the early twentieth century, and were focused on the production of large volumes in a very limited number of varieties by automated production lines and unskilled labour.⁶ Similarly, populuxe goods, as depicted for eighteenthcentury Paris, were inexpensive versions of aristocratic luxuries—stockings, fans, umbrellas, snuffboxes, and other items provided through illegal subcontracting and peddling outside the guild.⁷ Neither of these approaches captures the significance of the consumer novelties and delights of the eighteenth century. Their capacity to evoke both surprise and recognition and, above all, their place in daily life gave them a new dimension. To understand this novelty we turn to the contemporary context of social responses to and symbolism of objects in daily life. Such objects, once relatively rare, now multiplied and attracted broader

⁶ Styles, ‘Manufacture, Consumption and Design in Eighteenth-Century England’. ⁷ Cissie Fairchilds, ‘The Production and Marketing of Populuxe Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods, 228–48.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight parts of the population. By this means, even objects which we now perceive to be ordinary could convey ingenuity, choice, and culture.⁸ A key point about these objects, especially as they were perceived by the emergent middling classes of the period, was their modernity. They were not the luxuries of ostentation and excess associated with oriental despots, but those of novelty, fashion, and ingenuity. The genealogy of historical writing about these luxuries, semi-luxuries, and conveniences is a neglected by-way which stretches back to Malthus and Werner Sombart. From these, themes of demand and consumer goods attracted historians once more in the 1920s and 1930s, and Elizabeth Gilboy then provided an enduring analysis of middling-class consumption during the eighteenth century. John U. Nef took these themes in a surprising direction, provocatively addressing connections between consumption and industrialization. The British luxuries of the eighteenth century deployed quality, art, and style together with invention, mechanism, imitation, and novelty. Together these provided the attributes of the new luxury—delight, comfort and convenience, utility, the agreeable. Malthus, in the 1820s, drew attention to the lengths to which middling and even relatively ordinary people would go in order to buy these new luxuries; they provided the major motivation to work for the mercantile classes. These would not be kept in their counting houses if not motivated by a desire for leisure or for foreign and exotic luxuries.⁹ Sombart’s classic account in Luxury and Capitalism (1913) declared that the principal cause of the expansion of trade, industry, and finance capital over the whole period between 1300 and 1800 was the demand for luxury goods, especially by the nouveaux riches, the courts, and the aristocracy. An intensification of the demand for luxuries, sexual and political in origin, made fashion a driving force of social elites. Their desires could only be satiated by ever-increasing quantities and ever-differentiated qualities of consumer articles.¹⁰ Elizabeth Gilboy in 1932 extended this analysis of luxury demand from the elites to the middling classes. She argued that the new wants provided ‘one of the most active forces leading to changes in standards of consumption’. The new commodities led those with a surplus ‘to try this and that, and finally to include many new articles in their customary ⁸ Daniel Roche, Histoire des choses banales: naissance de la consommation dans les sociétés traditionnelles xviie–xix e siècle (Paris, 1997), 13. ⁹ T. R. Malthus, Principles of Political Economy (2nd edn., London, 1835), 403. ¹⁰ Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism (1913; Ann Arbor, 1967).

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The Delights of Luxury standard of life’.They also attracted those without the requisite surplus who worked harder to get this surplus, or skimped on necessities.¹¹ Finally John Nef, in an account isolated from those of contemporary economic historians in the 1950s, entitled The Cultural Foundations of Industrialization, wrote about the place of sumptuousness, surprise, and delight first as the goals of continental manufacture, then subsequently adapted in Britain to an economy of quality. He argued that Holland led the way in taking luxury into the adornment of domestic spaces; housing on a smaller scale with more intimate rooms provided the settings for beautiful objects. The spread of this style of living provided an incentive for the expansion of the production of such goods. England, he argued, built on this in new ways. For it had, already by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, achieved great successes in the production of cheaper wares using pig iron and coal fuels, and there was no questioning its advantage over France in coal, beer, lumber, iron, copper, brass, the metal manufactures, building materials, and cheap paper. What manufacturers and consumers turned to in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the production of their own luxuries instead of importing these. In doing so, they sought to deploy indigenous materials, techniques, and other advantages. The result was an ‘economy of quality’ that elicited increasing production and inventiveness.¹² The wants, desires, and demand singled out in these accounts are a part of the story of industrialization, but until very recently historians of the industrial revolution were sceptical of claims to any central role. The case for a consumer revolution as a factor in economic growth was dismissed by economic historians who treated demand as a response to technological change, increasing supplies of goods or overall economic growth. They argued that the case had to be made for a pre-existing rise in real incomes, and there was no evidence for rising standards of living over the period of the industrial revolution. Despite these denials by economic historians, the appeal of a consumer revolution has not gone away. Both cultural and social histories of consumerism and evidence of a relatively widespread increase over the eighteenth century in the possession of consumer goods have gathered force. If these factors can claim so little impact on the wider economy, they have still provoked a powerful shift in historical explanation. Consumption has reshaped the grand narrative of the period, displacing the former grand narrative of the industrial revolution. ¹¹ Elizabeth Gilboy,‘Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution’ (1932), in R. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1967), 121–38, p. 126. ¹² John U. Nef, The Cultural Foundations of Industrial Civilization (Cambridge, 1958).

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight New directions in historical writing are now reasserting connections between consumption and industrialization. Historians now actively investigate consumption patterns which were earlier assumed, on the basis of conclusions reached on the standard of living. Shifts in consumer practices are recognized to depend on changing tastes, the deployment of underemployed resources, especially within the household, and on a vocabulary which economic historians in recent decades had carefully removed to the cultural sphere, that is, desire, attitude, fashion, and emulation. Jan de Vries has now argued for connections between changing household behaviour and new markets for consumer goods. He asserts that the key incentive to this was the prospect of novelties, exotics, luxuries, and new addictive goods, along with the possibilities offered for employment, especially of women, in the market economy. He terms the changes provoked by these factors an ‘industrious revolution’ which preceded and accompanied the industrial revolution. Novelties, exotics, and ‘luxuries’, be these the special or fashion goods sought out by middling class and even labouring people, now moved to centre stage in provoking wider economic change.

From Sumptuary Laws to Sociability Economists associate luxury with elite consumption; they define luxury in terms of income, social division, and social exclusion. Luxury goods, in this analysis, are those goods to which most people do not have access.They feature in current consumer society as designer and branded goods connected with lifestyle choices of distinction, diversity, and individuality.¹³ This framework of social inclusion and exclusion has also shaped how historians interpret luxury. For luxury has traditionally been associated with sumptuary legislation, and with all the rank, hierarchy, and rigidity which this entailed. Sumptuary laws, imposed by European governments to prevent public display above one’s social station, were also frequently bound up with foreign imports. Statesmen and policy-makers connected luxury with exotic and foreign goods and their traders. This connection, as archaeologists and anthropologists have traced, runs deep through to ancient and primitive societies. Rare and precious objects stimulated long-distance trade in the ancient world. Elites selected particular rare materials for luxury objects: obsidian and shell in stone age societies, precious metals and rare organics in ¹³ Robert Frank, Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess (New York, 1999); Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth (London, 1977).

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The Delights of Luxury the metal age. Amber, ivory, incense, pepper, and silk were the priorities of Roman trade.¹⁴ But traders in foreign goods clashed with local sumptuary structures. Primitive societies frequently restricted trade to a few commodities, and treated those who dealt in such trade as strangers rather than kinsmen or friends.¹⁵ During the first decades of colonial contact tensions grew between fashions for new Western and Eastern materials and products and sumptuary regulations. This tension developed into one between indigenous and alien production systems. The purpose of sumptuary legislation became centred on protectionist regulation, upon import and export regulations and upon quality controls. The British discarded sumptuary regulations relatively early. During the sixteenth century laws banned the wearing of velvets, especially in red and purple, fine silks, furs, and embroideries for all but the highest ranks.The lower ranks dressed in local, heavy cloths dyed in natural colours. The rules were only fitfully enforced, then repealed in England in the seventeenth century. The state then tried to control luxury expenditure through protectionist and fiscal measures. A legacy connecting luxury and foreign imports passed into mercantilist debates and in protectionist legislation enacted during the mid-eighteenth century.¹⁶ Historians have treated the demand for luxuries as a constant of European civilization at least since antiquity, but the cultural framework for luxurious consumption shifted especially during the Renaissance. From this time it became an aspiration increasingly within the means of broader social elites. Historians and anthropologists have enquired into the psychological and cultural roots of this demand. The anthropologist Mary Douglas defined what she termed ‘valuables’ as a form of licensing of goods in modern economies.The characteristics of such goods included: highly specific powers of acquisition, controls on distribution, patron–client relations of production and trade, and the protection and reproduction of status systems. Fashion, however, inverted the social controls and status systems associated with luxury. With wider access to consumer valuables, the pursuit of fashion altered the social role of luxuries.Taste took over from luxuries as markers of stable status structures.¹⁷ Cultural critics such as Jean Baudrillard and Pierre ¹⁴ Andrew Sherratt, ‘Reviving the Grand Narrative: Archaeology and Long-Term Change’, Journal of European Archaeology, 3 (1995), 1–32, pp. 12–14. ¹⁵ Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), 33. ¹⁶ Alan Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law (London, 1996), 371; N. B. Harte, ‘State Control of Dress and Social Change in Pre-industrial England’, in D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (eds.), Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-industrial England (London, 1976), 132–65. ¹⁷ Arjun Appadurai, ‘Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things, 25.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight Bourdieu argued for a shift from the symbolic to the semiotic interpretation of objects. Baudrillard’s objects acquired a ‘sign value’, or a position in a public code relating objects and different social positions. Bourdieu argued that society valued a range of human productions according to taste. Objects and people became locations in common public structures of power, meaning, and identity.¹⁸ Arjun Appadurai, applying this semiotic approach, defined luxury goods as ‘incarnated signs’, and turned Mary Douglas’s social valuables into a register of goods whose use is rhetorical and social. Luxuries had a special ‘register’ of consumption, indicated by the following signs: 1. 2. 3. 4.

restriction by price or by law to the elites; complexity of acquisition; semiotic virtuosity, for example, pepper, silk, jewels, and relics; specialized knowledge as a prerequisite for their appropriate consumption, that is regulation by taste or fashion; 5. a high degree of linkage of their consumption to the body, person, and personality. But even this register is open to challenge. Restriction to the elites is not an essential element in the idea of a luxury. Any community or family may have symbolic days, persons, or occasions that need to be celebrated with especially rare consumption. Semiotic virtuosity is not a characteristic confined to luxuries; it may be applied to anything at all.¹⁹ Furthermore, such a semiotic approach is too abstract, dealing only with types of objects and types of people. Most personal possessions, and especially luxuries, are shaped by public structures of meaning, but in turn, these public structures are modified by how people experience and respond to such possessions in private.²⁰ To sum up, luxury goods have always played a central social and cultural role in Eastern and Western societies, from the ancient world to the present. They are always defined relative to perceptions of necessities and of surplus expenditure. Anthropologists see them as ‘social valuables’ characterized by highly specific powers of acquisition, controls on distribution, patron–client relations of production and trade, and the protection and reproduction of status systems. Cultural critics have preferred to define luxury goods in ¹⁸ Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Paris, 1981); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). ¹⁹ Mary Douglas, Thought Styles: Critical Essays on Good Taste (London, 1996), 111. ²⁰ James Carrier, Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism since 1700 (London, 1995), 8; Daniel Miller, ‘Consumption Studies as the Transformation of Anthropology’, in Miller (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London, 1995), 264–95, pp. 267–74.

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The Delights of Luxury terms of ‘incarnated signs’; such goods had semiotic virtuosity extending from the part perceived by pepper in cuisine, silk in dress, jewels in adornment, and relics in worship. They also had a high degree of linkage to the body, the person, and the personality. But definitions of luxury goods were always historical, shaped by public structures of meaning and private experience; we can see this in the shifting definitions of luxury goods between the early modern period and the eighteenth century.

Thinking about Luxury then The perception of luxury goods was as important as the proliferation of consumer objects in defining the part new consumer goods were to play in the possessions of the middling classes, and in the wider economic goals of emerging consumer society. Economic and social theorists from the late seventeenth century to the eighteenth century debated the meaning of luxury and its social and economic implications. Aspects of this debate have been treated by historians as problems in the history of political thought, or as literary and moral issues.²¹ But contemporaries were deeply interested in the changing characteristics of luxury goods, and in the problems of separating these from necessaries. They increasingly associated a broadening of the world of luxury commodities with the expansion of trade and commerce, and both with a new consumerism among the middling classes. Commercial writers, even in the seventeenth century, were well ahead of the intellectuals in the close connections they drew between commerce and luxury. Jacques Savary, the Comptroller of the French customs and editor of France’s first major commercial dictionary, wrote in Le Parfait Negociant, a textbook for businessmen: [Divine Providence] has not willed for everything that is needed for life to be found in the same spot. It has dispersed its gifts so that men would trade together and so that the mutual need which they have to help one another would establish ties of friendship among them. This continuous exchange of all the comforts of life constitutes commerce and this provides for all the gentleness (douceur) of life.²²

By the mid-1720s Defoe would attribute to this trade the well-being and free spending of England’s artisans and tradesmen, her ‘working manufacturing people’: ²¹ See Christopher Berry, The Idea of Luxury: A Conceptual and Historical Investigation (Cambridge, 1994); John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977). ²² Cited in A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), 60.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight The same trade that keeps our people at home, is the cause of the well living of the people here; for as frugality is not the national virtue of England, so the people that get much, spend much; and as they work hard, so they live well, eat and drink well, cloathe warm, and lodge soft!²³

Over the course of the eighteenth century the luxury debates moved far beyond their traditional concerns with the corruption of wealthy elites. The sumptuary laws which had previously proscribed the wearing of specific types of cloth and of gold and silver lace to all but the elites were repealed or withered away. Commentators increasingly made a distinction between ‘new’ and ‘old’ luxury, or between ‘modern’ and ‘ancient’ luxury. The division of labour and the expansion of commerce created new luxuries in contrast to old luxuries which relied on excessive displays of large bodies of retainers. Mandeville provoked a turning point in the discussion of luxury. He accepted traditional associations of luxury with vice. But in contrast to the disparagement of religious and moral campaigners, as well as of many intellectuals and political thinkers who sought to define the virtuous citizen, Mandeville declared luxury to be a public benefit. He furthermore challenged the defining boundaries between luxuries and necessities. Claims to moral virtue in the ‘needs’ for cleanliness, for comforts, decencies, and conveniences were no greater than those for luxury housing and furnishings. Men and women, in Mandeville’s view, were by their nature self-interested, pleasure seeking, and vain, and they sought luxuries to fulfil these psychological characteristics. By indulging their desires for luxuries, the rich, and others who could afford it, contributed to the expansion of commerce and the wider employment of the poor. After Mandeville, luxury was increasingly seen in terms of economic advantage. In France, Melon and Montesquieu devoted chapters of their treatises on political economy and government to luxury. But now luxury was not a subject of moral discourse, but of political economy.²⁴ Luxury became part of a wider discussion of commerce. Sir James Steuart distinguished ancient from modern systematic luxury. The new luxury, in his view, provided the objects of sensuality, so far as they are superfluous. Sensuality consists in the actual enjoyment of them and excess implies an abuse of enjoyment.The provision of luxury objects, Steuart argued, encouraged ‘emulation, industry and agriculture’.²⁵ David Hume and Adam Smith associated luxury almost ²³ Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, (London, 1726), 385–6. ²⁴ J.-F. Melon, Essai politique sur le commerce (Paris, 1734), and Montesquieu, Esprit des lois. ²⁵ See Jan de Vries, ‘Luxury in the Dutch Golden Age in Theory and Practice’, in Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), 41–56, p. 43; cf. Berry, The Idea of Luxury, 138–9.

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The Delights of Luxury entirely with commerce, convenience, and consumption. Hume separated out ‘philosophical’ from economic questions. Luxury was a ‘refinement in the gratification of the senses’, and an incentive to the expansion of commerce. The expansion of commerce would make available to all persons not just the necessaries of life, but its ‘conveniences’.²⁶ The consumer incentives offered by world trade, moreover, provided the impetus to domestic economic development. Hume set out these connections in felicitous terms, not in his essay on ‘Luxury’, later entitled ‘Of the Refinements of the Arts’, but in his essay ‘Of Commerce’: If we consult history, we shall find, that in most nations foreign trade has preceded any refinement in home manufactures, and given birth to domestic luxury . . . Thus men become acquainted with the pleasures of luxury, and the profits of commerce; and their delicacy and industry being once awakened, carry them on to further improvements in every branch of domestic and well as foreign trade; and this perhaps is the chief advantage which arises from a commerce with strangers.²⁷

For Adam Smith, the wealth of a nation lay in its ability to increase the quantity of ‘necessaries and conveniences’ which its labour could produce or exchange relative to its population. The division of labour, he argued, yielded ‘a multiplication of the productions of all the different arts’, and in ‘a well-governed society’ a ‘universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people’.²⁸ Adam Ferguson was to follow, defining luxury in general as desirable possessions: ‘that complicated apparatus which mankind devise for the ease and convenience of life. Their buildings, furniture, equipage, cloathing, train of domestics, refinement of the table, and, in generall all that assemblage which is intended rather to please the fancy, than to obviate real wants, and which is rather ornamental than useful.’²⁹ While many of these writers broadened their definitions of luxury to include wider consumerism, few went into any detail on actual commodities. Mandeville referred to buildings, furniture, equipages, and clothes. Melon mentioned foodstuffs and raw materials—sugar, coffee, tobacco, and silk, but also wrote elsewhere of rich stuffs, works of gold and silver and foreign laces, and diamonds.³⁰ It seems that it is not until Adam Smith that we see ²⁶ David Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary (1741, 1742; London, 1903), Part II, Essay 1, ‘Of Commerce’, pp. 259–75; Essay 2, ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’, pp. 275–89. ²⁷ Hume, ‘Of Commerce’, 270. ²⁸ Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Oxford, 1976), Book I, ch. 1, p. 22. ²⁹ Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767), 376–7. ³⁰ Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Remark L, p. 144; J.-F. Melon, ‘Of Luxury’, in A Political Essay upon Commerce, written in French by Monsieur M***. Translated with some Annotations, and remarks by David Bindon, Esq. (Dublin, 1739), 1, 3–8.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight luxury goods distinguished in analytical terms—ornamental building, furniture, collections of books, pictures, frivolous jewels and baubles—and separated from expenditure on retainers, a fine table, horses, and dogs.³¹ It was the commercial writers, from pamphleteers and journalists like Daniel Defoe and John Cary or Malachy Postlethwayt and Josiah Tucker, who revelled in the rich description of imported luxuries and domestic consumer goods. Daniel Defoe provided classic descriptions of a new kind of consumer good which met the demands of the middling and trading people, and extended far beyond the imported luxuries of the rich. The rich, he argued, might take the top-quality wines, spices, coffee, and tea, but the coarser varieties and the overall bulk of trade in all of these were taken by the middling groups—‘these are the people that are the life of trade’. The gentry might take the finest hollands, cambricks, and muslins, but the tradespeople took vast quantities of linens of other kinds from Ireland, France, Russia, Poland, and Germany. They, like their wealthy superiors, imported any number of drugs and dye stuffs including ‘brasil and brasiletta wood, fustic, logwood, sumach, red-wood, red earth, gauls, madder, woad, indico, turmerick, cocheneal, cantharides, bark peru, gums of many kinds, civet, aloes, cassia, turkey drugs, african drugs, east India drugs, rhubarb, sassafras, cum aliis’.³² To this abundance of imported foreign luxuries, the British now added their own desirable commodities, ranging from bone lace to wrought iron and brass, toys and locks, instruments, clocks, and watches for their own domestic as well as foreign customers.³³ A commodities list such as this was a popular rhetorical device in commercial handbooks of the time. It evoked a sense of the exotic wealth of the East, and was not unlike the listings of fabulous goods in contemporary travel accounts. The commodities list might be like a cabinet of curiosities, or it might be an entranced description of the contents of East and West Indian Company warehouses, such as Jean-Nicholas Parival’s Les Délices de la Hollande (1678). The detailed printed lists of merchants’ cargoes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were transferred as a formula for listing in newspaper advertisements, trade cards, and retail catalogues in similar detail to the extensive variety of eighteenth-century consumer goods. The list of commodities was a seduction, inciting passions for new forms of wealth and gratification.³⁴ ³¹ See Neil De Marchi, ‘Adam Smith’s Accommodation of “Altogether Endless” Desires’, in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850 (Manchester, 1999), 18–36. ³² Defoe, Plan for the English Commerce, 166; also p. 78. ³³ Ibid. 218. ³⁴ See Daniel Rabuzzi, ‘Eighteenth-Century Commercial Mentalities as Reflected and Projected in Business Handbooks’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (1995–6), 169–89, pp. 179–81.

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The Delights of Luxury It was not just the objects that attracted these commercial writers, but the people who bought them. Many commented on the spread of the consumption of superfluous things among the middling orders and the artisan and trading classes. John Cary in 1717 identified the pivotal role of the shopkeeper in connecting the ‘Inland trade’ with both foreign trade and the manufacturer. Ready markets for the manufacturer’s goods and ‘a Flux of Wealth causing a variety of fashions will add wings to their inventions, when we shall see their manufactures advanced in their values by the buyer’s fancy’.³⁵ Defoe in 1731 claimed, ‘tis for these your markets are kept open late on Saturday nights; because they usually receive their week’s wages late . . . these are the life of our whole commerce’.³⁶ Josiah Tucker praised the new manufacturers of England, ‘those especially in the toy, jewellery, cabinet, furniture and silk way’, and asked, ‘what species of People make up the Bulk of the Customers?’ He found them among the middling and tradespeople, even the mechanics: ‘the English of these several denominations have better conveniences in their Houses, and affect to have more in quantity of clean, neat furniture and a great variety, such as carpets, screens, window curtains, chamber bells, polished brass locks, fenders etc. Things hardly known abroad among persons of such a rank . . . it is a true observation that almost the whole body of the People of Great Britain may be considered either as the customers to or the manufacturers for each other.’³⁷ Other commercial writers, such as Malachy Postlethwayt (1707–67), distinguished different classes of consumer, and singled out the capacity to provide the widest variety and range of qualities of commodities, that ‘art of seducing, or pleasing to a higher degree the consumer of every kind’. ‘To tempt and please them all, it is proper to offer them assortments of every kind proportioned to their different abilities in point of purchase.’ Luxuries meeting the test of ‘look’, ‘elegance’, and price were now within the reach of the tradespeople. ‘The mechanic’s wife will not buy a damask of fifteen shillings a yard; but will have one of eight or nine; she does not trouble herself much about the quality of the silk; but is satisfied with making as fine a shew as a person of higher rank or fortune.’³⁸ Luxury was also increasingly perceived as a sociable activity, generated by cities, and participated in by the middling as well as the upper classes. ³⁵ John Cary, An Essay towards Regulating the Trade and Employing the Poor of this Kingdom (2nd edn., London, 1717), 100–2. ³⁶ Defoe, Plan for the English Commerce, 77. ³⁷ Josiah Tucker, ‘The Elements of Commerce and Theory of Taxes’ (MS, 1755), 23–6. ³⁸ Malachy Postlethwayt, Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved (2 vols., London, 1757), ii. 395.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight Mandeville, in a perceptive social-psychological analysis early in the eighteenth century, celebrated the pleasure of the city, its commercial exchange, its shopping, and its anonymity. Merchants, in the course of striking a deal, exchanged civility, entertainment, the use of country houses and coaches, conversation, and humour.³⁹ Shopping was a display of fashion, and of the actions of gesture and conversation which established an emotional relationship between the shopkeeper and female customer. The young lady and the mercer, a dealer in fine fabrics, both held a certain power in this relationship—he the knowledge of the price, she the choice over which shop she would patronize. The mercer is ‘a Man in whom consummate Patience is one of the mysteries of his Trade . . . By Precept, Example and great Application he has learn’d unobserv’d to slide into the inmost recesses of the Soul, sound the Capacity of his Customers, and find out their Blind Side unknown to them.’ But whatever his skill in deploying the arts of conversation and fashion, he could lose her custom through such trifles as insufficient flattery, some fault in behaviour, or the tying of his neckcloth, or gain it by no more than a handsome demeanour or an air of fashion.The ‘reasons some of the Fair Sex have for their choice are often very Whimsical and kept as a great Secret’.⁴⁰ The sociabilities of commerce and shopping were no longer the preserves of great merchants and young ladies. They were also the pleasures of manufacturers, tradesmen, and the middle ranks. The Scottish social thinker, John Millar, was to give special place by the end of the eighteenth century to ‘the middle rank of men’ who dealt with a large number of customers instead of being dependent on the favours of a single person.⁴¹ But this consumption of the middling ranks was never autonomous; it connected to the perceived behaviour of the wealthy. There was a close interaction between the consumers and the commodities; the desirability of objects was based, Adam Smith argued, in fashion and in elegance and utility. Objects frequently seen together became complementary, and the attraction of each was increased. Fashion, by contrast, was conveyed by those who possessed or displayed an object, and was a quality endowed by association with the high ranking. ‘The graceful, the easy and commanding manners of the great, joined to the usual richness and magnificence of their dress, give a grace to the very form which they happen to bestow upon it. As long as they continue to use this form, it is connected in our imaginations with the idea of ³⁹ Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Remark B, pp. 96–7. ⁴⁰ Mandeville, ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’, ibid. 353. ⁴¹ John Millar, Origins of the Distinction of Ranks, cited in Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, 105.

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The Delights of Luxury something that is genteel and magnificent . . . As soon as they drop it, it loses all the grace, which it had appeared to possess before, and being now used only by the inferior ranks of people, seems to have something of their meanness and awkwardness.’ Fashion thus changed continuously—clothes were outmoded within a year; furniture within every five or six years. They were therefore ‘not made of very durable materials’.⁴² Fitness and utility in objects were achieved through fine crafting, dexterity, and ingenuity. Smith admired these attributes, also achieved in ‘imitation’. Such objects were more valuable as luxuries to the wider economy than ‘horses, dogs and keeping a fine table’, because the labour that went into them endured in contrast to that which disappeared in the act of being performed.⁴³ Contemporary debates on luxury moved quickly from issues of excess, corruption, and sumptuary restraint to those of commerce and the consumerism of the middling ranks, to cities and sociability, and to psychological and cultural analysis of the senses, and taste. Contemporary emphasis on a new range of qualities and varieties of luxuries and the heterogeneous markets these served must lead us into questions of taste, the senses, and the cultural significance of commodities.These were investigated by twentiethcentury historians and social theorists in the context of court, salon, and domestic culture.

From Courts and Salons to Domestic Objects Sombart, at the beginning of the twentieth century, argued that the framework for the consumption of luxuries was set by the court and the salon. Consumer cities emerged where there was a royal court, for example in Paris, London, or Vienna; these cities serviced the lavish expenditure and sophisticated amusements of court society and increasingly of the nouveaux riches who also aspired to take part in elite society. Sombart explained the rise of luxury, ultimately, by psychology. He argued that personal luxury ‘springs from purely sensuous pleasure’. ‘Anything that charms the eye, the ear, the nose, the palate, or the touch, tends to find an ever more perfect expression in objects of daily use. And it is precisely the outlay for such goods that constitutes luxury.’This psychological impulse to gratify the senses was rooted in turn in sexuality. ‘In the last analysis, it is our sexual life that lies at the root of the desire to refine and multiply the means of stimulating our senses, for sensuous pleasure and erotic pleasure are essentially the same. ⁴² Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 194–5. ⁴³ See this concept fully explored in Neil De Marchi, ‘Adam Smith’s Accommodation of “Altogether Endless” Desires’, 18–36.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight Indubitably the primary cause of the development of any kind of luxury is most often to be sought in consciously or unconsciously operative sex impulses.’⁴⁴ Individual gratification is not, however, enough to explain the increase in luxury expenditure emerging from court society. Social relationships and the cultural framework of the court itself come into play. Ritual and manners were at least as important as sensuous pleasure. Sombart’s psychology of the senses was turned by Norbert Elias into a social psychology. Elias argued that the manners and rituals of sixteenth-century court society created a form of self-restraint that became part of the personality, and indeed of the psychology of the individual. The court expressed rank and displayed social boundaries; individuals involved were expected to spend and to display according to the dictates of what Elias refers to as ‘court rationality’. Courtiers, aristocrats, and retainers chose the size, ornamentation, and style of their houses to accord with their rank; the luxury expenditure to achieve this was ‘necessary’ as a means to aristocratic social assertion.⁴⁵ Elias argues that people at the time saw this form of self-constraint as timeless, eternal, indeed as part of the human personality, rather than as historical. Court society imposed restraint on spontaneous impulses and emotions. The preservation of one’s social position depended on a psychological view of people involving precise observation of oneself and others in terms of longer series of motives and causal connections. This was a form of ‘courtly observation’; it was never concerned with the individual in isolation.⁴⁶ For Sombart and Elias the luxury possessions of the wealthy during the Renaissance were thus explained by the psychological and socialpsychological features of court society. Luxury was also, however, about cultural displays of power. Elizabeth I used goods as instruments of rule. The cult of durable consumer goods developed to convey family status. The use of ‘patina’, that is, luxury objects capable of surviving several generations, became a sign and guarantee of standing.⁴⁷ In France, Louis XIV’s furnishings were demonstrations of his power. The court furniture was intended to be impossible to imitate. Under Louis XV, however, such luxury objects became more commodified; furnishings were no longer central to demonstrating royal power.⁴⁸ ⁴⁴ Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, 61. ⁴⁵ Stephen Mennell, Norbert Elias: Civilization and the Human Self-Image (Oxford, 1989), 84. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 101. ⁴⁷ Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington, Ind., 1988), 15–18. ⁴⁸ Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley, 1996), 49–56.

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The Delights of Luxury But these luxuries, associated with the court and subsequently with the salon and the noble household, also became a demonstration of taste. Objects were accorded value not just for the rarity of the materials in them, but also for an appreciation of their craftsmanship. Luxury objects denoted a refinement of a sense of taste and expressed civility. As Goldthwaite has argued, taste was extended to new kinds of objects; it was a way of ‘transforming these objects into high culture’.The values attached to an object like maiolica extended ‘from standards of personal comportment at table to literary erudition displayed by its painted decoration’. Such objects made for a new elite, not just of wealth, but of taste and refinement.⁴⁹ Historians of luxury, both recently and in the past, have noticed the increase in the place of domestic settings for the display of luxury, and the part played by women. Sombart argued that after the seventeenth century women drew luxury into the confines of the domestic sphere. Women ‘objectified’ luxury, replacing feasts and entertainments for large bodies of attendants into a preference for rich dresses, comfortable houses, and precious jewels. Mistresses and courtesans sensualized and refined luxury. In England especially, argued Sombart, it was furnishings and houses which became objects of the greatest expenditure. And he cited the traveller von Archenholtz who wrote in the eighteenth century: No part of Europe exhibits such luxury and magnificence as the English display within the walls of their dwelling houses. The staircase, which is covered with the richest carpets, is supported by a balustrade of the finest Indian wood, curiously constructed and lighted by lamps containing crystal vases. The landing places are adorned with busts, pictures, and medallions; the wainscot and ceilings of the apartments are covered with the finest varnish and enriched with gold bas-reliefs and the most happy attempts in painting and sculpture.The chimneys are of Italian marble, on which flowers and figures, cut in the most exquisite style, form the chief ornaments; the locks of the doors are of steel, damasked with gold. Carpets, which often cost three hundred pounds a-piece and which one scruples to touch with his foot, cover all the rooms; the richest stuffs from the looms of Asia are employed as window curtains, and the clocks and watches with which the apartments are furnished astonish by their magnificence and the ingenious complication of their mechanism.⁵⁰

From mistresses, courtesans, and court culture, historians have turned to salon culture. This is once again centred on women. The salons of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France were the crucial means, since ⁴⁹ Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 249. ⁵⁰ Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, 105.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight the middle of Louis XIV’s reign, of integrating the recently ennobled into the ranks of the nobility. The salons, it could be argued, were about imparting the politics of taste and style. They provided an apprenticeship in noble manners to the newly ennobled. The salons were not divorced from court life; they were a means of access to the court, and did not develop an oppositional aesthetic in dress, furniture, or interior decor.⁵¹ But this is to place these objects only within a framework of displays of power by king and court. Wider consumer markets including the middling classes invoked fashion rather than dynastic status.The ownership of a new mahogany writing desk in eighteenth-century Paris would convey little about social class, only something about wealth, nor would it represent corruption or virtue, only fashion.⁵² The salon, however, might also become a platform for the exercise of taste along with the active promotion of commerce. The bluestocking, Elizabeth Montagu, used her literary salon as a cultural display and an exercise in the ‘right use of luxury’. She lived ‘in the highest style of magnificence’, and her apartments and table were ‘in the most splendid taste’; she was recognized as an arbiter of literary and artistic taste and as a writer on aesthetics. Her lavish expenditure on Montagu House employed British artists and craftsmen, including those working in bronze, marble, glass, woodcarving, and gilding. She encouraged experimentation with new art techniques designed to imitate expensive metals, and was an enthusiastic advocate of Matthew Boulton’s ornamental metalwares. She connected her power as a consumer to the promotion of British industry, writing to her sister, Sarah Scott, in 1790 ‘I am going to the city end of the town this morning to bespeak 280 yards of white Sattin for the window curtains of my great house, and about 200 for the hangings. I think this order will make me very popular in Spittal Fields.’⁵³

From Luxury to Fashion The court and the salon provided the first cultural context for luxury; the domestic interiors of the wealthy followed. Wealthy consumers distinguished themselves through taste and aesthetics. But the new commod⁵¹ Auslander, Taste and Power, 51, 66, 142. ⁵² Dena Goodman, ‘Furnishing Discourses: Readings of a Writing Desk in Eighteenth-Century France’, in Berg and Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, 71–88, pp. 82–3. ⁵³ This discussion of Elizabeth Montagu and her salon is drawn from Elizabeth Eger, ‘Luxury, Industry and Charity: Bluestocking Culture Displayed’, in Berg and Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, 190–206.

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The Delights of Luxury ities—ornamental, superfluous decorative goods available in many varieties and prices—found a new cultural context in the domestic interiors of the middling classes and in a burgeoning shopping sector; here it was fashion that dictated.The new commodities had all the ingenuity, variety, and clever artifice suited to fashion markets. Where luxury found its cultural context in codes of civility, manners, and taste, fashion, and the consumer goods associated with it were framed within codes of ‘politeness’.‘Politeness’ was about the form or manner in which people interacted. It included behaviour and personal style, but also extended to taste, fashion, and design in objects, building, and interiors. It was action that was socially agreeable and moderate; it was conversation that conveyed ease and reciprocity.⁵⁴ New wealth needed to be educated, and the choice, display, and use of the variety of goods had to be cultivated. But equally the prosperity based on commerce, as found in the new towns of the north and the midlands, had the effect of increasing knowledge and civilization. Polite culture responded to economic improvement and moral and social reform. It was an ethos for the urban middling classes, as well as modern commercial polities.⁵⁵ Politeness went with the fashionable display of the latest goods; the most widely available examples were in the shops now ubiquitous throughout the country. Inclusiveness and creditworthiness were about the display and ornamentation of one’s shop and one’s person, and, by extension, of one’s household.⁵⁶ The timing of a shift to the pervasive influence of fashion has been situated mainly in the eighteenth century, though historians do refer to the role of fashion in the much more restricted markets of the sixteenth century. Henry VIII was captivated, it is claimed, by French fashions under François I. Fashions in London by the end of the sixteenth century were a ‘dizzy turmoil’, changing rapidly from Italianate to French, to Dutch, and ‘Babylonian’.⁵⁷ The century was ‘one of lively innovation in styles and technology in ⁵⁴ Laurence E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, 43 (2002), 869–98, pp. 874–5. ⁵⁵ Ibid. 875; cf. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1775–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 279–85; Mark Girouard, The English Town (New Haven, 1990), 86. ⁵⁶ See the literature on politeness: Laurence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994), and his ‘Politeness for Plebes’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds.), The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800 (London, 1995), 362–82, pp. 372–3; Paul Langford, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 12 (2002), 311–31, p. 319; R. H. Sweet, ‘Topographies of Politeness’, ibid. 355–74, 365–9; Helen Berry, ‘Polite Consumption: Shopping in Eighteenth-Century England’, ibid. 375–94, 377–8, 383, 388. ⁵⁷ Joan Thirsk, ‘Luxury Trades and Consumerism’, in Robert Fox (ed.), Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien Regime Paris: Studies in the History of the Skilled Workforce (Aldershot, 1998), 257–62, p. 259.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight the consumer market’.⁵⁸ Clearly the old divide once set out between a world of luxury expenditure defined by status in the sixteenth century, and one marked by fashion in the eighteenth century, is one too sharply drawn. But, nevertheless, fashion came to play a greater part through the construction of a fashion system, and through wider cultural changes in the place of privacy and more individual expressions of identity and pleasure. Fashion, as Simmel, the early twentieth-century social and cultural theorist, argued, was exercised by only a part of a given group, with the majority on the road to adopting it. He argued that it was a class characteristic, with those of the higher strata of society distinguishing themselves from those of the lower strata. But its boundaries and contents also moved over time. Over time it became broader and more animated, and the contents of fashion were no longer so expensive or extravagant as they had been in the past.⁵⁹ Historians sometimes draw a line between luxury and fashion, arguing that the polemic against luxury blocked the analysis of fashion. Some fashionable pieces of clothing were not luxuries, and court ritual and ecclesiastical ceremony deployed luxury, but not fashion. Luxury was associated with the Orient, but fashion triumphed in Europe. An aesthetics of ‘patina’, conveying family status and antiquity, dominated definitions of luxury goods before the late seventeenth century, while a fashion system and novelty took precedence after. Some at the time disparaged the rise of fashion. The Chevalier de Jaucourt in the Encyclopédie distinguished between luxury and fashion, praising the artisanal craft skill and high-value materials of luxury goods, but chastising the instability and ephemerality of the fashion trade.⁶⁰ But continual changes in style enabled distinctions to be made, and new wealth could elaborate its own compelling aesthetic. While luxury and taste were initially defined within the constraints of the court and the salon, new luxuries were associated with social encounters and fashion within the domestic setting of urban housing. The rapidly expanding middling classes during the eighteenth century made the pursuit of novelty and fashion a reality. The social use of objects developed with systems of taste and cultural significance to make attractive consumer goods. Manufacturers could make objects for particular markets after understanding and manipulating the meanings of different designs for consumers. In England and Holland the social differentiation of highly ⁵⁸ Thirsk, ‘Luxury Trades and Consumerism’, in Fox (ed.), Luxury Trades and Consumerism, 259. ⁵⁹ David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (eds.), Simmel on Culture (London, 1997), 190–202, p. 191. ⁶⁰ M. Chevalier de Jaucourt, ‘Mode’, Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des arts et des métiers (36 vols., Paris, 1751–80), x. 198.

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The Delights of Luxury urbanized societies, and the greater focus on households and the domestic environment, brought different cultural systems to bear in establishing tastes. The attraction of printed calicoes from the mid-seventeenth century is a case in point. Brought by merchants from India for use in curtains and bed hangings, they were adapted by these same merchants to finer fabrics for the fashion clothing market. These were desirable not only because they embodied the look of elite fabrics with relatively low prices. They were desirable because they appeared in Europe at a time when lightness of fabrics and floral patterns were particularly fashionable.They suited a style of dress with many pleats and multiple layers designed for silks. Calicoes could be used in the same style of dress as silks, but they had the modern novelty of more ‘natural’ prints in contrast to the formal baroque floral designs of French brocades and embroideries.⁶¹ In this way printed calicoes and Indian muslins fulfilled both the features of imitation and distinction. They were novel, but fitted within the broad framework of style.The range of materials, from imported painted silks and imported fine Indian printed calicoes and muslins to British-produced calicoes, which merchants and manufacturers brought to the market between the 1770s and the 1790s, interacted closely with perceptions of developing tastes and fashions. Merchants could play their part in cultivating cosmopolitan tastes among the elites as well as producing a taste for less expensive, but nonetheless novel, commodities among the middling and lower classes. Aesthetic and lifestyle changes among the middling groups might spur the search for innovation.⁶² Similar movements in systems of taste affected ceramics and iron. The fashion for tea drinking, and the changes in table manners which increased the number of dishes included in a dinner service, generated the demand for oriental porcelains. New indigenous types of pottery, imitating the attributes of oriental porcelain, became new products, successfully developing both domestic and foreign markets. Wedgwood developed a strategy of innovation to keep his products in step with subtle changes in fashion. The domestic setting rather than the courtly display cabinet provided the really significant cultural stimulus to the demand for pottery. In the case of iron, extensive innovation in decorative ironware was deployed in fireplaces and stoves. Urban housing, smaller-scale rooms, and privacy helped to create a demand for a combination of efficient heating and decorative detail.⁶³ ⁶¹ Mukerji, From Graven Images, 190–2; Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 15–17. ⁶² Mukerji, From Graven Images, 241–7. ⁶³ Ibid. 249–53.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight

From Imitation to Invention: Eighteenth-Century Commodities The shift in the meaning of luxury from excess to convenience and enjoyment did not take place in isolation. Discourse moved in response to both broader commercialization and the rapid development of a heterogeneous urban society. But this was also a national response to the characteristics of the traditional foreign suppliers of luxury goods. Modern design and mechanical ingenuity combined with attempts to substitute for foreign imports, producing in turn a novel kind of consumer good—cheaper, but also different from traditional luxury wares, and containing the added attractions of modern invention and fashion. It was thus that product innovation proceeded alongside technical innovation. The French, in the seventeenth century, produced furniture with new exotic materials—tropical wood, marble, gilding, marquetry, tortoiseshell, and bronzes. In the eighteenth century it became possible to replace these rare materials with less luxurious substitutes, and indeed to use these in innovative ways for new decorative effect. New types of furnishing were also invented, more mobile, ‘comfortable and agreeable’.⁶⁴ In response to women’s preferences, dressing tables, bedside tables, women’s writing desks, needlework tables, and movable chairs were introduced. These new furnishings were decorated with a range of new techniques substituting rare and exotic finishes: for example, the lacquer, verni Martin, new gilding processes, the vanishing cube style of marquetry, and mother-of-pearl inlays.⁶⁵ In Britain, other new furnishings, teaware and tea chests, cabinets and dining tables, japanned ware, and upholstered pieces offered their own distinctive fashion. Product innovation was combined with a new modernism in technique in decorative metalwares, ceramics and glass, light furnishings, and clocks and watches. The new luxuries and semi-luxuries in these groups of commodities were entirely new products, or they were products transformed by the new materials with which they were made, or by their ornamentation or finishing. New techniques of dyeing, printing, transfer printing, stamping and rolling metals, gilding and ormolu, and extensive innovation in varnishes and lacquers transformed the range of goods, their appearance, and their qualities and varieties. A focus on quality, variety, and fine wares, and a fascination with those that came from abroad, came to inspire the improvement of native manufactured goods from the seventeenth century. This was no simple mercantilist project, a replication of previously imported goods, but a dynamic ⁶⁴ See Auslander, Taste and Power, 58, 67, 90.

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⁶⁵ Ibid. 122–8.

The Delights of Luxury process of new product development. A proliferation of British consumer goods endowed with attributes of convenience and utility, variety and novelty, met the demands of fashion markets, not just at home, but also in Europe and the Americas. The broader groups of the population who craved an ever-increasing and ever-changeable body of material goods at affordable prices excited innovation and spurred on industrialization. The quality road, hidden in most of our histories of industrialization, had at its heart that ‘economy of delight’ of ‘modern luxuries’ and new consumer goods.⁶⁶ The practice of ‘imitation’ was fundamental to this process. It relied upon a perception of the exotic and oriental provenance of traditional luxury goods. It was these goods, imported into Europe from the later seventeenth century on a scale so unprecedented as to make them available as luxuries even to some of the middling classes, that inspired the new consumer luxuries and semi-luxuries. The new goods were produced in Europe, but most successfully in Britain, to be used and displayed in domestic and civilized settings. Sometimes substitutes, but more frequently quite new commodities, their production processes were to be marked by skill, technique, variety, and artistry. These attributes were also perceived at the time to be the principles underlying the success of oriental luxuries. ⁶⁶ See Nef, Cultural Foundations, for discussion of the search for quality and delight in early modern Europe, esp. pp. 128–39.

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2


Goods from the East We fetch our models from the wise Chinese¹

Learning from Asia Projectors, ships’ captains, and trading companies followed the routes to China through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, initially seeking an oriental treasure trove, but finding the key goods which would transform the consumer cultures of Europe’s elites and middling classes, and ultimately even of its artisans and labourers. In the process European manufacturing practice was changed in response to the reception of Asia’s tea, porcelain, and textile fabrics. This was a phenomenon which affected the whole of Europe, and not just Britain; the trade in those Eastern goods must be a wider European story. What was the route by which these goods came from the East? In January 1718 Nathaniel Torriano, a captain and supercargo on the Augusta, an East India Company vessel, set sail for China. As a supercargo, Torriano acted as the company manager aboard ship and in port. He carried the role of merchant, banker, linguist, and diplomat, and was expected to be a man of education, ability, and incorruptible honesty. Torriano arrived in Canton on 20 August, and stayed there for the next five months, time he spent selling his cargo, placing orders, going shopping, and loading his ship for the return voyage. He sold the Chinese some goods from Europe including copper, steel, some glassware, and clocks and jewellery, but much of his cargo was made up of Indian calicoes picked up en route in Batavia. He went shopping in Canton with his Hong merchant or Chinese intermediary, Pinkey Chougua, and collected thousands of pieces of porcelain, ordered a ¹ James Cawthorn, Of Taste: An Essay (1756), cited in Hilary Young, English Porcelain 1745–95: Its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption (London, 1999), 74.

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Goods from the East great deal more, and also bought a range of other Chinese luxury goods, lacquered ware, tea tables, silk, and taffeta. He filled the rest of his space with tea, though tea was not yet the dominant incentive of trade that it was to become later in the eighteenth century. When Torriano arrived back home in July 1719, he started the process of selling off his Asian luxury goods in a series of auctions and private sales that lasted right through the following year.² A few years later Torriano was on the seas again to Canton, possibly racing other vessels from the Dutch, French, or Danish East India Companies. Another Englishman, Charles Hall, captained the Marquis de Prié for a private partnership from Ostend in 1723, and raced such a group of ships from the English company, all arriving in Canton at just about the same time. Like Torriano, Hall brought back large quantities of porcelain, with much more of his cargo made up of tea. He also brought back a range of Chinese medicinal drugs including rhubarb, china root, cubebs, and galingale, as well as mercury, vitriol, Chinese ink, several kinds of gum, lacquered ware, scented wood, mother of pearl, precious stones, and gold. His cargo was valued at £49,296 5s. 6d.³ The profits from the expedition would have paid for several country houses: the architects William and John Halfpenny, Robert Morris, and Thomas Lightoler in 1742 calculated costs of a plain country villa at £3,152, while a major country seat might cost £16,810.⁴ Forty years after these voyages by Hall and Torriano, William Hickey took the Earl of Elgin, an East Indiaman, on a more protracted voyage that left England in late April 1763, and did not arrive in China until late June 1765. He recorded another fifteen English and European ships arriving from mid-July to late August. In the next six months he spent in Canton, he took on his official cargoes, tea, porcelain, and silk; tea was by this stage the reason for the voyage. The porcelain, which was only a secondary commodity, most likely amounted to 17,000–20,000 pieces which were subsequently sold in early 1767 in an official sale of 1,371 lots as well as in several private sales. The voyage was extremely lucrative, yielding payments of £20,492 4s. 9d.⁵ Hickey’s profits in the 1770s and 1780s would have been more than enough to fund the building and machinery of several large Arkwright type ² The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA), Chancery Masters Exhibits C112.24, Torriano. ³ Conrad Gill, Merchants and Mariners of the Eighteenth Century (London, 1961), 19–25, 38–9. ⁴ W. Halfpenny, J. Halfpenny, R. Morris, and T. Lightoler, The Modern Builder’s Assistant (London, 1742), cited in R. G. Wilson and A. L. Mackley, ‘Building the English Country House, 1660–1880’, Economic History Review, 52 (1999), 436–68, p. 451. ⁵ Geoffrey A. Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain and its Influence on European Wares (London, 1979), 96–8, 106–8.

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~ 48 ~ Map 2.1. World trade routes late eighteenth century Source: Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. ii.

Goods from the East cotton factories, insured in the 1780s at £3,000 for a one-thousand spindle mill and £5,000 for one twice this size.⁶ The background to these voyages was a long-standing European acquaintance and fascination with oriental luxury goods. Fine tableware in ceramics, glass, and silver was, in Renaissance Italy, a sign of civility, and princes, aristocrats, and wealthy merchants displayed oriental porcelain among their domestic possessions. But the trade in oriental consumer goods took on whole new dimensions with the extension of maritime trade and the founding of the East India Companies early in the seventeenth century. This trade changed the material culture of Europe, bringing with it new objects, colours, patterns, and finishes. With the trade with the East was born an enchantment with China which came to be expressed in a European style, ‘chinoiserie’. A large-scale trade in oriental porcelain aimed to meet this taste. These oriental luxury goods—not only porcelain, but silks, calicoes, and lacquerware—derived from Asian consumer cultures, but were quickly adapted to meet the demands of overseas markets in the Middle East, then Europe. Remarkably large-scale production processes and highly sophisticated networks of trade and distribution made these goods familiar parts of the material culture of the middling classes and the gentry over all parts of Britain and her empire. Such domestic ornamental goods, satisfying a taste for the exotic East, inspired Europe’s and especially Britain’s own industrial and design responses. Oriental commodities were profoundly attractive; once the possibilities of their possession moved beyond princes and aristocrats, there seemed no stopping the expansion of trade. Apart from the objects themselves, there was enormous fascination with the exotic skills and production processes behind the materials, colours, and patterns otherwise undiscovered in Europe. For these were not the long-accumulated skills and artistic genius of the individual craftsman. They were processes involving largescale production, division of labour and specialization, and commercialization and adaptability to the diversity of global markets. The classic ancient luxury import from Asia to Europe was silk, brought to Europe over the fabled Silk Route. Silk production was first developed in the West in Byzantium in the sixth century ce, and brought to Spain then southern Italy in the ninth and tenth centuries. Chinese silk was still imported into Europe by Portuguese and Dutch traders in the early modern period, though Italy became the main producer for the West. Instead of silk, it was the relatively new imports of calicoes, porcelain, and lacquerware ⁶ S. D. Chapman, The Cotton Industry in the Industrial Revolution (2nd edn., London, 1987), 27.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight whose popularity and extensive trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were to have the greatest impact on European, and especially British, industry. These latter commodities were not perceived to be high luxuries like gold and silver objects or jewellery, or even silk, nor were they base goods for a mass market. They were imported as decent, high-quality semi-luxuries available in a range of patterns, styles, qualities, and prices; and they appealed to markets ranging from the middling orders to elite consumers.The ability of Asian producers to satisfy the rapidly growing and diverse market in Europe challenged European producers to respond in kind. Asian models led Europeans to ‘imitate’ production processes and marketing strategies, as well as to produce their own import substitutes. The calicoes, porcelain, lacquerwares, and other ornamental goods imported in quantities from Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries retained the exotic qualities that enhanced their desirability. Edward Said argued that the West transformed the East into a discourse; between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries it prefabricated a construct of the East as the West’s image of the Other. The Other was mysterious, duplicitous, and dark, carrying connotations of inner, secret strangeness.⁷ The exotic East had, however, long been perceived over the course of the medieval and early modern period through contact with particular objects—fabrics, carpets, ceramics, furnishings, jewels, colours, patterns, and ornament. Indeed, back to even earlier periods in other parts of Eurasia, China was called ‘Serica’ to correspond with the Chinese word ‘si’ for silk; its other name, ‘China’, derived from the Chinese word ‘ci’ for ceramics.⁸ From Cardinal Gonzaga’s collection of Turkish and eastern treasures in the fifteenth century to the Paris shops selling ‘objects of Lachinage’ as a part of collections of curiosities, Eastern goods retained a sense of luxury and difference.These Eastern commodities, however, ‘objectified’ oriental discourse. They were a construct of the market, seeming to represent the lives and values of the East, but constructed by their Asian producers to meet Western preconceptions of Eastern art.⁹ European views of China affected the objects brought to Europe. Within the context of the European luxury debates, China was associated not with sensuality and excess, but with ethics, harmony, and virtue. China and ⁷ E. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; Harmondsworth, 1991). ⁸ Gang Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities and Socioeconomic Development c.2100 B.C.–1900 A.D. (Westport, Conn., 1997), 113. ⁹ L. Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (London, 1996), 69; Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 66; P. J. Marshall, ‘Taming the Exotic: The British and India in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in G. S. Rousseau and R. Porter (eds.), Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester, 1990), 46–65.

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Goods from the East

Fig. 2.1. Famille verte saucer dish, 1700. Export ware porcelain depicting scenes from Chinese life were especially popular in European markets. Sotheby’s Picture Library.

Confucius inspired Leibniz, then Voltaire and the Encyclopédistes, to perceive through the prism of Chinese objects their own aspirations to human elegance and refinement. In possessing things Chinese, they sought to access levels of civilization beyond the market. But in fact the market dictated from the earliest times. The Asian objects which reached Europe from Roman antiquity onwards were commodities made to Middle Eastern tastes, or to meet the diverse demands of the Indian Ocean trade.¹⁰ These were easily adapted to occidental aesthetics.The ‘chinoiserie’ which so dominated European styles ranging from clothing to furnishings, architecture, and gardens during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was itself a construction of an imaginary Orient, which in turn dictated the commerce in Asian imports. Chinoiserie ¹⁰ J. M. MacKenzie, Orientalism, History, Theory and the Arts (Manchester, 1995), 103.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight became fashionable in England by the second decade of the seventeenth century. Oriental art and crafts at the time were seen to be Chinese. During the sixteenth century, the only kind of oriental art in Europe was Chinese— highly expensive objects sold in Lisbon, Antwerp, and the China shops of London’s Royal Exchange.¹¹ The designs and the objects were integrated into the baroque and later the rococo styles, and harmonized with Western arts. They conveyed exoticism along with greater informality. Asian luxury goods and designs easily assimilated and transmitted crosscultural characteristics across great distances. This made them highly successful transmitters of technology, designs, and aesthetics. Chinese porcelain was, from very early stages, so deeply embedded in long-range commerce that early designs were copied from silver, and subsequently sold throughout Islamic lands as a substitute for gold and silver which were condemned as a material for eating vessels under Koranic traditions. In the West during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries porcelain services replaced the silver plate melted down by aristocratic families during European and civil wars.¹² Chinoiserie designs on porcelain sold in the West, and on the delftware copies made there later, reduced the complexity of Chinese visual culture, and met demands for styles conveying a creative imagining of China. Similarly, calicoes imported from India were adapted to tastes for chinoiserie. Painted Indian cottons were not traded directly between Britain and India until 1649 when the first English ship carrying these sailed from the Coromandel coast. Before this the Portuguese and the Dutch included small amounts of them in their luxury cargoes. Merchants quickly adapted their markets for calicoes to an already established fashion for Chinese art, and placed orders for patterns picked out on a white ground rather than traditional Indian red or coloured grounds.¹³ Clever marketing strategies extended sales from furnishing fabrics to fashionable clothing goods. By the last third of the seventeenth century, elite women and men led a new fashion for printed calicoes fabricated for informal wear such as ‘morning gowns’ and as the textile of choice for new styles. By 1687 the East India Company reported that chintz had ‘become the weare of Ladyes of the greatest quality which they wear on the outside of Gowns and Mantuoes, which they line with Velvet and Cloth of Gold’. With the ascendancy in ¹¹ Oliver Impey, Chinoiserie: The Impact of Oriental Styles on Western Art and Decoration (Oxford, 1977), 20–6. ¹² Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History’, Journal of World History, 9 (1998), 141–89, pp. 178–9. ¹³ John Irwin and Katherine Brett, Origins of Chintz (London, 1970), 4.

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Goods from the East England of William and Mary, the Dutch fashion for chintz went yet further. ‘The greatest Ladyes will now wear [chintzes] for upper Garments as well as for Petticoates. They can never make, nor you send us, too many of them.’¹⁴ Like porcelain, chintz was adapted to European tastes, but it was even more responsive to the rapid fashion changes of the clothing trades. These goods could yield not just variety of pattern, but yearly changes in the patterns and even the types of flower used in the patterns. By the mideighteenth century European chinoiserie designs were copied in India from copper-plate prints, and transformed by Indian copyists into rich polychrome patterns.¹⁵ Lacquerware furnishings were another Asian luxury import with great seductive appeal. They had a big impact upon European designs and subsequently substitute products. These were never imported in very large quantities; the best goods came from Japan, and retained their status as an expensive luxury. Lacquerware was one of the standard commodities listed in the moral discourse on luxury: ‘As ill Weeds grow apace so . . . nothing was thought so fit . . . to adorn . . . for the ornament of Chambers like Indian screens, Cabinets, Beds and Hangings; nor for closets, like China and Lacquer ware.’¹⁶ The most common furnishing exported was a cabinet with two doors enclosing a set of small drawers and a small central cupboard. In Europe these were placed on stands, and frequently used to display pieces of porcelain or other exotic objects. Gentlemen’s private spaces and occasional special bedrooms held lacquerware furnishings and oriental cabinets with secret drawers and curious treasures. Signalling fantasies and sexuality, they beckoned access to wider world sensibilities. Lacquer had all the aesthetic attributes prompting transition from exotic rarity to fashion goods. The lacquer was made from the resin of a sumach tree which grows only in East Asia. It is difficult to work, requiring many thin coats of the toxic material. It was painted with landscapes, flowers, or birds on a dark background, often with gold leaf and raised in low relief.¹⁷ This early luxury trade was, however, to have a major impact on European furnishing styles and the furnishing trades. It prompted many patents to mimic the process, and to create an extensive range of new products decorated in lacquer, and it generated an Asian trade in goods made on European models. English joiners ¹⁴ Cited ibid. 30. ¹⁵ Ibid. 32. ¹⁶ Anon., A Discourse of Trade, Coyn and Paper Credits and of Ways and Means to Gain and Retain Riches (1679), cited in H. Huth, Lacquer of the West (London, 1971), 36. ¹⁷ Impey, Chinoiserie, 111–14; O. Impey, ‘Japanese Export Lacquer of the 17th Century’, in W. Watson (ed.), Lacquerwork in Asia and Beyond, Colloquies on Art & Archaeology in Asia 11 (London, 1982), 124–59.

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Fig. 2.2. Palampore (bedcover or hanging). Cotton, painted and dyed. India (Coromandel coast), mid-eighteenth century. V&A IS 30-1966. These popular hangings and bed curtains and covers frequently incorporated European flower designs. V&A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

complained of the competition of these imports, claiming that between 1697 and 1701 5,582 tea tables, 4,120 powder frames, 655 tops for stands, 818 lacquered boards, 597 sconces, 70 trunks, and 52 screens had been imported. ‘Merchants . . . trading to the East Indies have procured and sent over to the East Indies Patterns and Models of all sorts of Cabinet Goods; and have ~ 54 ~

Goods from the East returned from there such Quantities of Cabinet Weares; manufactured there after the English fashion by our Models, that the said Trade in England is in great danger of being utterly ruined . . .’¹⁸ Asian lacquerware and its European copy, japanned ware, were extensively integrated into the rococo furnishing styles of Louis XV in France between 1720 and 1750. Its popular extension to all manner of objects made it the ideal commodity chosen by Diderot to display flow line production.¹⁹ Porcelain, chintz, and lacquerware became the defining commodities of a chinoiserie style which dominated much of European material culture over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From bedroom and inner sanctum or collector’s cabinet, they spread to morning rooms and drawing rooms, soon comprising the essential elements of a fashion style. The ease with which these products were assimilated into European culture was allowed by the facility of Asian producers in responding to markets for designs and objects in oriental themes carefully tailored to meet Western tastes. That facility was matched in turn by readily expansive production capacities able to provide not only the quantities, but the range of qualities, models, and prices demanded by rapidly expanding middling and elite markets over the period. The quantities of luxury and semi-luxury consumer ware exported from Asia varied greatly between the overwhelmingly dominant textiles, and the relatively small proportions of porcelain and lacquer. On quantitative measures this trade in total does not look all that significant.The value added by industrial capacity to process imported tropical groceries came to only about 1 per cent of Europe’s total industrial output. Imported raw materials had more linkages, but much smaller quantities of these were imported during the seventeenth and first three-quarters of the eighteenth century. Cotton was the great example of a European industry adopted in the context of oceanic trade, but even in the 1840s this industry contributed only 7 per cent of Britain’s GNP.²⁰ These measures only underline the sheer size of domestic markets and production. Europe’s trade in Asian and American commodities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was significant because it was relatively new, and because it grew so swiftly.The trade going through the Baltic during this period showed little change in the composition of its northern European commodities, but a mixed category of colonial ¹⁸ Cited in Huth, Lacquer of the West, 58. ¹⁹ E. L. Jones, Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (Oxford, 1988), 173. ²⁰ P. K. O’Brien, ‘From the Voyages of Discovery to the Industrial Revolution’, in H. Pohl (ed.), The European Discovery of the World and its Economic Effects on Pre-industrial Society 1500–1800 (Stuttgart, 1990), 154–77.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight Table 2.1. Estimated EIC average textile imports 1671–1750 (pieces and thousands of pesos) Year 1671–80 1691–1700 1711–20 1731–40 1741–50

Pieces

Sales

578,000 296,000 552,000 765,000 772,000

1993.3 1845.2 3493.0 4237.2 5005.2

Source: Taken from N. Steensgaard, ‘The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch before 1750’, in J. D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires (Cambridge, 1990), 126.

commodities increased 500 per cent over the period. Pepper, spices, textiles, and silk made up three-quarters of total imports before 1740; towards the end of the period tea and coffee were among the prominent imports.²¹ What did this mean in amounts of porcelain? In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Chinese exported a million pieces of porcelain a year through the English East India Company. Eight vessels returned to Britain in 1777–8 alone carrying 345 tons of porcelain. Textiles dominated manufactured exports from Asia; they made up 67.9 per cent of the value of English East India Company Asian imports in 1668–70, and 80.6 per cent in 1738–40. Porcelain and lacquerware exports were much smaller; they nevertheless had wide ramifications for setting principles of design and fashion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.²² The English East India Company’s imports of chinaware and porcelain from China accounted, at their peak in the early eighteenth century, for 13.3 per cent of the total value of its imports, a year in which a similar peak in imports of raw silk from China reached 19.7 per cent. The respective values of these imports were £20,815 and £73,483.To place these figures in perspective, ²¹ N. Steensgaard, ‘The Growth and Composition of the Long-Distance Trade of England and the Dutch Republic before 1750’, in J. D. Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires (Cambridge, 1990), 102–52, pp. 106, 118. ²² Ibid. 151; K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1978), 96; D. Ormrod, ‘Northern Europe and the Expanding World-Economy: The Transformation of Commercial Organisation, 1500–1800’, in Proceedings of the Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica ‘F. Datini’ (Prato), 29 (1998), 671–700, table 2; K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘European Trade with India’, in T. Raychaudhuri and I. Habib (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1982), i. 382–406, p. 401.

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Goods from the East Table 2.2. English East India Company: peak years of imports of chinaware and porcelain Year

Value (£)

% of total Asian imports

1693 1697 1699 1702 1704 1705

6,275 13,067 15,282 18,764 20,815 14,338

10.4 8.9 3.9 5.0 13.3 7.0

Source: K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company 1660–1760 (Cambridge, 1978), appendix 5, table C.8.

tea imports from China reached 19.2 per cent of total import values in 1722, and declined after that until 1747 when they rose again to 20 per cent, and 31 per cent in 1748, and as high as 39.5 per cent of import values in 1760.²³ Porcelain and cotton imports accompanied Asian-inspired revolutions in food consumption, dress, and sociability. Coffee and tea drinking moved from occasional to habitual beverages; they were popularized in public and domestic social settings—the coffee house and café culture, and informal gatherings of family and friends for tea. Elite and wealthier middling-class partakers preferred refined versions of the necessary ceramic vessels for hot liquids in lightweight, translucent, and highly decorated porcelain available only from China or Japan. Likewise, printed cotton fabrics imported first as bed curtains and later adapted to dress styles took over markets for fancy woven silks and linens, forcing producers of these expensive but traditional fabrics, in turn, to mimic the fluid and natural yet exotic designs of the new fabrics. The capacity of Asian producer economies to meet Europe’s demands for fine consumer ware must raise questions about the role of such luxury and semi-luxury goods in Asian economies. Did luxury goods play a similar part in Asia to that in Europe? Were these luxuries foreign exotics, or domestic products? Were the products produced for Western markets versions of similar goods produced for Chinese or Indian consumers? Or was this production for Western markets an early form of export processing in enclave economies? ²³ M. Berg, ‘Manufacturing the Orient: Asian Commodities and European Industry 1500–1800’, Proceedings of the Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica ‘F. Datini’ (Prato), 29 (1998), 385–419, Tables 2 and 3; Chaudhuri, Trading World, 519, 535, 539, 547–8; appendix 5, table C.8.

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Asian Consumer Goods and Consumer Culture In China, just as in Europe, the dynamics of human consumption changed in response to changes in income and shifts in taste. An active consumer culture and a highly commercialized economy provided the vital supports for the trade in export wares to Europe. A constant theme of world history and of economic history is the Asian failure to make the transition to economic growth in the early modern period, in contrast to European and especially British success in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Historians in the past have blamed the European demand for luxuries which out-competed Asian buyers, causing inflation and political destabilization.²⁴ They have pointed to the adverse impact on Asian societies of fluctuations in the supply of silver brought in by Europeans. They have more frequently blamed corrupt and extravagant elites and military expenditure by governments. Indian administrations failed to define the merchant’s position at law; without property rights, markets could not work efficiently. According to some historians, the Islamic empires were ‘fly-trap economies’ which squandered resources on luxuries for the elites and military expenditure, leaving little of direct benefit to the economy. Asian central governments more generally failed to create the financial and legal institutions in which trade and industry could flourish and become independent of luxury demand. On the basis of such arguments Eurocentric historians have claimed that these societies lacked a ‘growth ethic’.²⁵ The point is not to look at why Asia failed, nor is it to engage in special pleading for its great accomplishments which are too little recognized by Western historians.²⁶ Instead let us look at Asia’s commercial and manufacturing characteristics, and the particular expertise which China, Japan, and India acquired in internationally traded consumer and luxury goods. What did Western observers, merchants, and manufacturers learn from these, and how did they adapt them to their own purposes? China had long experience of extensive commercialization and integration into the international economy dating back to its precocious technological progress during the Song-Yuan period (960–1368). During the early modern period a wide range of consumer goods, most designed for popular markets, was available to rapidly expanding urban populations. And the market was facilitated by extensive canal development. The merchant ²⁴ Richard Van Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China 1000–1700 (Berkeley, 1997). ²⁵ See David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York, 1998). ²⁶ See A. G. Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998). This whole complex of reasons for Asian decline is rehearsed in Jones, Growth Recurring, 132.

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Goods from the East and industrial groups grew more prosperous. The inhabitants of Suzhou consumed in an extravagant and usual way. The state for a short time attempted to curb the extravagance of once humble classes with sumptuary laws, but these proved unenforceable.²⁷ Chinese ceramics sold to sixty-four foreign destinations, and textiles to eighty-five; China traded metalproducts=gold, silver, copper, and iron†to another 134.²⁸ At the time ofthe Ming dynasty (1368-1644), China’s main imports were horses, materials for Chinese medicines and monetary metals, but throughout the early modern period China was also the main supplier of industrial goods throughout Asia. It exported iron goods, textiles (silk and cotton), ceramics and lacquerware, as well as silver, gold, and copper and lead products, a whole range of handicrafts, stationery, and books. China’s main barter good to the Spice Islands was Indian piece goods acquired in its own triangular trade.²⁹ Chinese ships trading to Japan during the Ming period averaged 298.4 tons; those travelling to South and West Asia had loading capacities of 955 tons. During the Ming period 130 Chinese government-registered vessels travelled overseas each year; the return tonnage on these was 1,767,120 tons a year. The China–Manila trade was also extensive, rising to 3,200 tons by the end of the Ming period, and was dominated by high-value goods. The Chinese traded huge quantities of porcelain to these Asian markets both before and after European markets opened. In 1645 alone 229,000 pieces were sold to the Japanese, and another 300,000 to the Arabs through the Dutch. Compare this trade to Europe’s imports. Europe never took more than 31 per cent of the trade (and this for a brief period in 1645 to 1661), while the South Seas and Japan claimed over 80 per cent for most of the period.³⁰ It is for this predominantly Asian trade that the South China Seas and Indian Ocean are referred to by China’s historians as the Asian Mediterranean.³¹ Japan underwent a similar phase of economic growth, urban expansion, and commercialization under the Tokugawa shogunate from the late sixteenth century. Rapid urbanization, the rise of Edo (Tokyo) as a city of a million people, unification of the market, and regional specialization seemed to compensate for economic policies shunning foreign trade. Yet ²⁷ Jones, Growth Recurring, 80 –82. Tim Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure. Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 220 –222. ²⁸ Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities, 134. ²⁹ Kent Deng, ‘A Critical Survey of Recent Research in Chinese Economic History’, Economic History Review, 53 (2000), 1–28, pp. 4–5. ³⁰ C. Ho, ‘The Ceramic Trade in Asia, 1602–82’, in A. J. H. Latham and H. Kawakatsu (eds.), Japanese Industrialization and the Asian Economy (London, 1994), 35–70, pp. 37, 38. ³¹ Gang Deng, ‘The Foreign Staple Trade of China in the Pre-modern Era’, International History Review, 19 (1997), 253–83, pp. 264–5, 276.

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Fig. 2.3. Chinese traders in Nagasaki—scenes of life at the Chinese settlement in Nagasaki, Japan. Some of the trade in Japanese goods was conducted through Chinese merchants. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

still the domestic market expanded; agricultural productivity growth allowed higher living standards to traders, clerics, warriors, and urban producers of goods and services. Cottage industries produced lacquerware, fans, parasols, toys, footwear, paper lanterns, and a whole range of small manufactured goods.³² ‘Japan developed a varied, stylish economy, full of clever devices and clever designing, though no machines.’³³ China, Japan, and India were long-standing models of highly urbanized commercial societies making for a flowering of consumer culture. Already supplying domestic and international consumer markets on a vast scale, how were Asian production processes affected by new European markets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

Asian Production Processes Asian success stories in providing consumer markets in Europe go back to the special features of luxury commodities, and the trade established in ³² Jones, Growth Recurring, 158. ³³ Eric Jones, Lionel Frost, and Colin White, Coming Full Circle: An Economic History of the Pacific Rim (Boulder, Colo., 1993), 35.

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Goods from the East these throughout Asia. Luxury objects produced by specialized non-local craftsmen were universally desired by most societies.The reasons for this lie not just in aesthetic sensibilities, but in art, religion, and magical transformation. The appeal of such objects dictated the continuity of trade even in times of political conflict. But an active trade also developed across Asia in ordinary domestic commodities—coarse cloth, earthenware, iron implements, and brass utensils. Product variations even in very ordinary goods were closely associated with locality, along with a sense of the markets such goods were intended for. Regional specialization and extensive product differentiation were the keys to production processes.³⁴ Before the onset of significant trade with Europe, Asian producers— especially those in China—were famed for the ingenuity of their technology and for the scale of their operations. The early modern ironworks of the Hubei/Shaanxi/Sichuan region had six or seven furnaces giving employment to a thousand men.³⁵ The porcelain city, Jingdezhen, was said, by the late fourteenth century, to be the largest industrial operation in the world, with over 1,000 kilns, 70,000 workers, and production processes that anticipated modern assembly-line manufacture.³⁶ Its multi-chamber ‘dragon kilns’ stretched as far as 60 yards up hillsides. These could fire more than 50,000 pieces at a time over several days.They also provided for temperature differences of as much as 600°C between the firebox in the lower area and the chimney in the upper, so that in a single operation a whole range of wares could be produced, from high-fired porcelain in the lower chambers to earthenware in the top.³⁷ By contrast the production of Indian chintzes was a cottage manufacture, but here the regional specialization, division of labour, and sophisticated networks of information flows provided a marvel of protoindustrial activity whose success outpaced European textile production until the factory system.The most celebrated cotton districts of India were the Punjab, Gujarat, the Coromandel coast, and Bengal. Long before European trade, the cottons of the Punjab contributed to the caravan trade with Afghanistan, Persia, and Central Asia, as well as to the maritime trade to the Persian Gulf. The white, striped, and checked cotton of the Gujarat went to the Middle East. High-quality cottons from the South of India and Bengal found markets in the Middle East, South East Asia, and the Far East.³⁸ Production processes were highly differentiated. The production of any single piece of ³⁴ K. N. Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe: Economy and Civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, 1990), 304–9. ³⁵ Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford, Calif., 1973), 285. ³⁶ Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art’, 156. ³⁷ Ibid. 148. ³⁸ Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 308.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight chintz relied on distinctive classes of farmers, harvesters, those who ginned the cotton fibre, carders, spinners, weavers, bleachers, printers, painters, glazers, and repairers. Their occupations were hereditary, dictated by their caste.³⁹ The early lacquerware exported to Europe from Japan was produced on a much smaller scale, but even this was by no means an individual craft luxury. One seventeenth-century British trader described a makeman (makie-man) or lacquer maker who had fifty men working day and night. The lacquer was painted with scenes, flowers, or birds on a dark background, often with powdered or cut gold leaf, and raised in very low relief.⁴⁰

Production for European Markets Production for Europe was added to long-standing production cycles for the pan-Asian trading ring. As we have seen, production had long been honed to diverse tastes across social, religious, and national groups from the Middle East to Japan. These export-orientated textile regions quickly assimilated and adapted European styles and motifs to a new kind of oriental design for European markets. In India there were distinctive sets of industrial districts. The English East India Company merchants traded through bases in Surat, Madras, and Bengal.The prices of the Gujarati calicoes were half those of the Bengal muslins, and two-thirds those of the Coromandel chintz bought in Madras. Surat in 1664 provided 50 per cent of the total quantities imported from Asia by the East India Company, and Bengal 9 per cent; by 1728–60 the high-quality expensive fabrics of Bengal made up 60–80 per cent of the volume traded.⁴¹ These regions had the capacity to produce an enormous range of types, qualities, patterns, lengths, and widths of cloth, a diversity we usually think of as available only in the global markets of the twenty-first century.⁴² The link between the East India Company and the weavers was achieved through Indian merchants at the ports who used an advance contract system, that is, they employed agents who advanced money to weavers specializing in the kinds of fabrics needed. This advance payment bound the weavers legally to deliver cloth to the contractor at the time agreed. The whole system relied on a close network of information—town to town, village to village—of skilled and reliable weavers able to deliver the qualities ³⁹ Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 309, 319. ⁴⁰ Impey, Chinoiserie, 112–14. ⁴¹ Berg, ‘Manufacturing the Orient’, 401 and table 1; Chaudhuri, Trading World, 291, 296 and appendix 5, table C.2. ⁴² Beverly Lemire makes this point in Fashion’s Favourite, 18.

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Goods from the East

Map 2.2. Calico painting and printing in South India Source: Irwin and Schwartz, Studies in Indo-European Textile History.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight and patterns desired on time, and agents travelled the textile regions seeking these out.⁴³ Production processes do not appear to have changed a great deal to meet European demand; instead more labour was recruited through customary family and village networks. Cotton chintzes were dyed and painted with degrees of skill unmatched in Europe before the nineteenth century. Using vegetable and organic dyes combined with chemical washing yielded brilliant and fast colours. But there were no fewer than ten to twelve separate dye transfer processes.⁴⁴ Chinese centres of porcelain production were concentrated near to areas of suitable clay, notably the two fine white clays—kaolin and pai-tun-tzu. Much of the European ware was produced in one centre, Jingdezhen, a whole city of porcelain production, with a small amount, as well as decoration, available in Canton. Another centre, Tehua, produced the blancde-chine also admired in Europe. Jingdezhen was an old centre for porcelain decorated in underglaze cobalt (the blue and white), and produced the early pieces which reached the West in the fourteenth century. When the Dutch traded for it in the early seventeenth century, their agent in Bantam reported: ‘You are hereby informed that the porcelains are made far inland in China and that the assortments which are sold to us . . . are put out to contract and made afterwards with money paid in advance, for in China assortments like these are not in use.’⁴⁵ Jingdezhen by the mid-seventeenth century, during the Ming Dynasty, was said to contain a million inhabitants, and to extend a league and a half along a river. It contained about 500 kilns supplying three to four thousand factories, ‘and to those who approach it at night it has the appearance of a large city on fire’. This porcelain city had been rebuilt after a fire in 1683; a series of innovative directors reorganized its factories, promoted the invention of new glazes, and increased productivity. Factories were departmentalized even down to a high degree of division of labour in the decorating studios. Painters specialized in particular motifs—flowers, birds and animals, or mountains and rivers—and no one piece of porcelain was a personal creation.⁴⁶ The merchants, however, never saw the porcelain city. It was a considerable distance from Canton in the north-west of Kiangsi province, and was connected by waterways to Nanchang in the south and Nanking in the ⁴³ K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean (Cambridge, 1985), 200–2. ⁴⁴ Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 317. ⁴⁵ Impey, Chinoiserie, 92. ⁴⁶ Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 113; D. F. Lunsingh-Scheuleer, Chinese Export Porcelain (London, 1974), 24–8.

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Goods from the East

Map 2.3. Japan, China, and South East Asia Source: Impey, Porcelain for Palaces.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight

Fig. 2.4. Tea caddy, c.1740.This tea caddy represents a negotiation between a Dutch merchant and a Chinese trader. Sotheby’s Picture Library.

north. All European trade was done through the Hong Merchants who controlled trade in Canton, and acted as go-betweens for the Chinese authorities. The English traded for this porcelain initially through three ports—Amoy, Chusan, and Canton. In Amoy they also had access to Japanese goods. But by 1710 the Chinese had confined foreign trading to Canton. Though the Europeans were excluded from this inland industrial city, they did have some access to the Cantonese factories on the islands of Honan and Foshan, and to the decorating shops. The Canton decorating shops which provided a form of intermediate or substitute porcelain seemed to function as part of a European offshore production centre of the eighteenth century. White pieces were purchased by European merchants ~ 66 ~

Goods from the East in Canton, and taken to decorating shops to be painted in overglaze to designs supplied by the merchants. Extensive division of labour was deployed over a labour force of old men and young children in long galleries of over a hundred workers. The process saved European merchants the long order times and higher costs for especially decorated goods which would otherwise be ordered from Jingdezhen. The overglaze decoration was also crude, its low quality little esteemed by the Chinese, but deemed to be adequate to the demands of European markets.⁴⁷ Most of the porcelain was bought through a Hong merchant who took European merchants out to some of the hundred or so shops in Canton where they bought their goods, and placed orders for others.The production and distribution systems were flexible enough to absorb an enormous increase in demand for goods in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the producers also adept at copying the shapes and designs sought in European markets. In 1777–8 well over 800 tons of chinaware was carried by European East India Company vessels, with Britain taking nearly half of this.⁴⁸ Japanese production was relatively new in the seventeenth century, and developed very rapidly into an important part of the porcelain export trade. Early trade with the Dutch before the country was closed in 1641 was followed by highly restricted trading from the small island of Deshima. The porcelain was made in the Hizen province of Kyushu island, with most of the production centred on the small town of Arita. It was carried to the bay of Imari, from which it took its name, Imari ware, then shipped to Nagasaki for export. The potters were strictly controlled through a system of licensing; at the beginning of the eighteenth century 180 potters were licensed. Contact between potters and merchants was non-existent. The Dutch traders were not allowed to learn Japanese; they had to rely on Japanese interpreters who were often obstructive. As in Canton, trade took place through these Japanese interpreters in a number of porcelain booths set up in Deshima. But prices were high and supplies unreliable. Indeed, the Japanese did not appear overly concerned with the direct trade to Europe. Porcelain bosses had other markets, both domestic and Chinese, and only just tolerated a trade that demanded special shapes and designs based on delftware samples.⁴⁹

⁴⁷ Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 103; C. L. Jorg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade (The Hague, 1982), 123. ⁴⁸ Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 47. ⁴⁹ H. Nishida, ‘Japanese Export Porcelain during the 17th and 18th Century’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1974), 65–9.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight

Chinoiserie Adaptation of designs and shapes to European tastes required a complex interaction of responses to market demand and technique. A process of imitation was put in train, and a form of chinoiserie created in the process. This imitation was frequently commented on by Western observers who admired the ease with which Asian craftsmen accommodated to the alien shapes, colour schemes, and flora preferred in Europe. But they also mocked the ‘slavish’ copying this entailed. An agent of the Dutch East India Company in the early seventeenth century complained, ‘Chintzes are painted here according to musters which are given to the painters which they then imitate completely and extremely well, for their national character is so stupid that they cannot imagine anything by themselves, but can only imitate something so that it has a complete likeness . . .’⁵⁰ In the early Coromandel chintzes the subject matter was derived from Persian or Deccani miniature paintings and from Chinese ceramics, as well as from Jesuit engravings. But from the third quarter of the seventeenth century artisans were increasingly dependent on pattern books or musters sent from England, Holland, and France.⁵¹ This process of imitation, applied to the production of European wares, was simply carried over from much broader practices. Artisans, as in India, bound into hereditary labour systems, were also tied by social conventions which specified the designs they used. ‘The actual motifs themselves often had symbolic, hidden meanings attached to them, understood and recognised by the members of the community.’ When this practice was extended to the international market, it was equally clear that industrial workers had to meet the tastes and preferences of their consumers. The effect of this international market orientation was to reinforce the specialization of producers to specific export zones. High risks, borne by the merchants, attached to experimentation with designs.⁵² The East India Company merchants, by the eighteenth century, however, attempted to break through to a more adaptive form of imitation.The Court of Directors wrote: We send you some patterns, which may govern you so far as to see thereby that we want some new Works . . . endeavour to send us every year New Patterns, as well of the Flowers as Stripes, at least five or six in a bale, and let the Indians Work their own Fancys, which is always preferable before any Patterns we can send from Europe.⁵³ ⁵⁰ Cited in Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 302. ⁵² Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe, 302–3, 312.

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⁵¹ Irwin and Brett, Origins of Chintz, 9. ⁵³ Cited ibid. 303.

Goods from the East

Trade and Marketing Access of European merchants to trade in Asian manufactured goods was gained through the series of state monopolies, the East India Companies, which were set up initially to bring spices and raw materials such as indigo to Europe. The Portuguese monopoly was broken by the Dutch at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and by 1605 the Dutch had control of the major part of the Spice Islands; they also opened up a trading station or factory in the Muslim port of Surat. An English factory was set up there in 1612. There were Dutch and Portuguese factories on Hirado Island and Nagasaki Harbour in Japan by 1609. The Portuguese continued to control direct trade with China; it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that English, Dutch, and other Europeans were allowed to trade at Canton. Dutch factories spread around the Indian coast, and the English acquired Madras, then, later in the seventeenth century, Bombay and Calcutta. The initial focus of the Indian factories was the acquisition of Indian commodities, especially textiles, to export to Bantam, Achin, Malacca, and Manila to use instead of silver to exchange for pepper and spices. The Indian merchants who had controlled this intra-Asian trade in printed cotton textiles were ousted from the Indonesian trade by the Dutch. The Companies were also founded to supply European markets with manufactured goods. Where a limited trade in cloth, porcelain, and lacquers had before been available to northern ports through Lisbon, the Revolt of the Netherlands ended this. The English and Dutch companies were formed in 1600 and 1604 respectively to trade directly. The Dutch seized Portuguese carracks loaded with porcelain in 1600 and 1604; sales afterwards in Amsterdam caused a sensation. The printed calicoes imported as ‘pintados’ by the Portuguese, and as ‘chint, chintes, chintz or pintathoes’ by the English, provided yet more new incentives to trade. Other European nations followed.The first French company, the Compagnie des Indes Orientales, was formed by Colbert in 1664, and a Compagnie de la Chine was formed in 1698. Another company, the Compagnie Perpétuelle des Indes, formed by John Law in 1719, greatly expanded operations of an already respectable French trade, and by the third decade of the eighteenth century France was a formidable competitor in the trade with India.The short-lived Ostende Company (1715–27) operated from the Southern Netherlands.The Swedes and the Danes also formed their companies after the end of the Ostende company, and traded with some considerable success until the end of the eighteenth century. These chartered companies, a north European method of trade through central distribution agencies, were grafted onto ~ 69 ~

Luxury, Quality, and Delight pre-existing systems of production and trade in luxury and bulk goods. The companies traded at both levels, and in the intra-regional trade in the Indian Ocean as well as in the trade to Europe.⁵⁴ The trade in textiles and ceramics between Asia and Europe was based on trade routes and trade organization already marked out for the spice trade. Subsequently this trade in manufactures was adapted to that for colonial groceries, notably tea. The trade in high-quality luxury manufactures was based in the long-standing emporia trade. But the extensive production and marketing throughout the Asian world of coarse low-quality wares was also well developed by the fifteenth century. This was not a ‘mass’ production since products were finely adapted to fit the specialized tastes of different markets throughout southern Asia. These pre-existing conditions provided Europeans with a model to develop a new scale of marketing for what came to be seen as semi-luxury ware. They thus gained not just from Asia’s advanced technologies, but from its sophisticated structures of international marketing. The goods traded were differentiated to suit the demands for both distinctive identities and novelty in the markets of the middling classes. They were also produced and traded in sufficient volumes to make them affordable. The growth in European demand for Indian textiles was fostered by the East India Companies, and subsequently curtailed by European governments. As early as 1609 the English East India Company was investigating types of cotton cloth available in Western India which were deemed suitable for European and Middle Eastern markets. It sought 12,000 pieces of fine white fabrics and the painted calicoes of Gujarat; the Dutch East India Company ordered 7,000 similar pieces in 1617. Imports also focused on the coarser cottons of the inter-Asian trade, imported both for the African slave trade and for the cheaper ends of the European market, but at this stage, for clothing, there was little displacement of European linens and fustians for common use. In the 1620s the Court of the English East India Company reported ‘calicoes are a commodity whereof the use is not generally known, the vent must be forced and trial made into all parts . . . much of it is very useful and vended in England whereby the price of Lawns, Cambricks and other linen cloth are brought down’.⁵⁵ The company tested the market for its textile imports, and frequently expressed concerns about overstocking the market. It imported velvets, cover⁵⁴ Chaudhuri, ‘European Trade with India’, 382–406, p. 388. ⁵⁵ K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: A Study of an Early Joint Stock Company 1600–1640 (London, 1965), 195.

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Goods from the East lets, quilts, damasks, taffetas, and pile carpets from Persia; it tried out cotton piece goods, gave up on some, but did well with white baftas from Gujarat used for bed and table linens. It used the terminology of the European linen trade, for example calico lawns, to sell the new cloth. It imported dutties or coarse strong calicoes usually dyed blue or brown and used for packing and making sails. Its greatest successes were with chintzes, pintadoes, and striped calicoes, used initially for curtains or hangings. By the latter half of the seventeenth century the main increase in demand was for clothing fabric for luxury and semi-luxury markets. At the end of the century the Dutch and English companies were importing over a million pieces each of Indian cotton goods, and by the eighteenth century Bengal muslins and Coromandel chintz were the new luxury textiles.⁵⁶ The companies forged their successes not on mass market textiles, but on more expensive, differentiated fabrics for a discerning, class-conscious market. The key to the market was in identifying a wide range of semi-luxury and luxury fabrics, colours, and patterns suited to a broad middling class attuned to distinctiveness, fashion, and novelty, as well as a clear divide between ornamental and useful ware. These fabrics were clearly seen by their consumers and by contemporary moralists as luxuries partly because they were oriental imports, but more because they were coloured, patterned, and fine fabrics. The Dutch moralists who condemned the vainglorious cloth as harmful to the nation’s interests did not stand a chance against a public which liked the cloth. Swedish puritans who associated the cloth with Eastern luxuries and the decline of morals could not hinder the prosperity of the Swedish East India Company.⁵⁷ The same luxury and semi-luxury markets lay behind the rise of porcelain imports in the same period. But in this case the companies needed to make no effort to create a vent for a desirable product for which no substitute existed. Porcelain always constituted a relatively small proportion of the companies’ total trade, but it was important in very different ways. It was porcelain, to a much greater degree than textiles, which defined the ‘Orient’ to European consumers. The early pieces to reach Europe were high-luxury goods, esteemed for their translucence, durability, and fine distinctive blue and white decoration. There was nothing in Europe at the time to match these (hard paste porcelain was not made there until 1709). Most English families ate from pewter plates, wooden trenchers, or coarse earthenwares which were still clay or brick coloured.Tin glazed earthenwares of the Delft ⁵⁶ Ibid. 195, 282, 402. ⁵⁷ Michel Beurdeley, Porcelain of the East India Companies (London, 1962), 117–18.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight type were owned first by the elites then later the middling households of Holland from the early seventeenth century, but the white glaze was easily chipped, and the earthenware was unsuitable for teawares. Oriental porcelain was thus not just an ornamental novelty, but a useful decency.⁵⁸ Porcelain, however, had other qualities which lifted it beyond elite luxury markets. It could be produced in China and Japan in large quantities, and even the most basic Chinese ware was still more attractive than what was available in Europe. It was also heavy, and if not used as ballast (more commonly copper or saltpetre was used for this), it went deep into the holds just on top of the true ballast of ships carrying valuable cargoes of spices and silk, and later of tea. It was an ideal semi-luxury good; the highest-quality ornamental pieces graced the porcelain cabinets of the palaces and châteaux of Europe’s monarchs and nobility. But equally, upwardly mobile tradespeople in European towns could afford the pieces of useful ware distributed by local ‘china men’. Kakiemon ware, a blue and white ware based on sophisticated Japanese designs taken from textile prints, Ukiyo-e prints, and illustrated books, was exported first, then Imari ware, the enamelled red and green decoration. Europeans prized the polychrome decoration, threatening their own producers of tin-glazed pottery. Only the Dutch, from their factory at Hirado, and the Chinese had direct access to this trade; other European merchants bought from Chinese merchants.The trade was, however, very limited.The highest volumes were achieved in the mid-seventeenth century. Thereafter there was limited and erratic trade in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁵⁹

The Mechanics of Trade The East India Companies succeeded in developing markets for Asian luxury goods, and in organizing the supply and shipping of the goods. Their production systems could provide the goods, copy the shapes, and adapt to the designs sought in European markets. Merchants sent out to China European models and prototypes for basic tea and chocolate cups, saucers, plates, bowls, but also for more specialist candlesticks, goblet-shaped flower pots, punch bowls, and small tea kettles. They sent the shapes in wood or in a whole range of stoneware, silver, pewter, and glass to be copied in porce⁵⁸ Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 114. ⁵⁹ Oliver Impey, ‘Japanese Export Market Porcelain’, in J. Ayers, O. Impey, and J. V. G. Mallet (eds.), Porcelain for Palaces (London, 1990), 25–36; Nishida, ‘Japanese Export Porcelain’, 65–9.

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Goods from the East

Fig. 2.5. Chinese punch bowl, Cricket in Mary-le-bone Fields, from engraving by Hayman. c.1790. Many clubs ordered punch bowls, customized with their own images or coats of arms. Bridgeman Art Library.

lain. Not only shapes, but patterns were copied and adapted.The East India Company did the same in India. Merchants sent pattern books and musters from England, Holland, and France for Indian calico printers and painters to copy.⁶⁰ Much of the trade in ceramics, especially by the English, was in relatively standard useful ware—cups, saucers, bowls, plates, and teapots ordered by the ton. Ships’ captains and supercargoes were more interested in providing sufficient ballast for vessels than in specialist designs. Thomas Hall, working for the Ostende Company, loaded his ship in 1724 with 167 chests. Orders for any one ship in the 1720s usually included 1,000–2,000 each of plates, cups and saucers, and soup plates and bowls; by the early 1770s the Company order for a season included 80,000 single plates and 87,000 small teacups and saucers.⁶¹ More of the special designs and shapes were confined to the so-called ‘private trade’. Private, or personal, trade was encouraged by the companies as a reward to ships’ officers and crews for lengthy voyages and dangers; indeed the private trade preceded company imports of porcelain, and continued to be the main means of import of the bulk of a wide range of goods, ⁶⁰ Irwin and Brett, Origins of Chintz, 9. ⁶¹ Gill, Merchants and Mariners, 38–9; Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 44.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight including lacquerware, fans, painted glass, paper, mats, clay images and ornaments, as well as most decorative and armorial chinaware. Other permitted goods included pictures, cabinets, screens, sugar-candy, Persian carpets, and diamonds. Fans, for example, were imported in tens of thousands on any one voyage; the Europeans never succeeded in producing a similar priced substitute. The English East India Company in the 1770s restricted its own imports to tea, silks, and chinaware of fairly standard lines.⁶² There was sometimes conflict between the private trade of officers and seamen and trade on behalf of the company. Private traders were partly blamed in 1680 for glutted calico markets, and in the 1730s for falling chinaware prices, and limits on trading were imposed and revised accordingly. Nathaniel Torriano who, as we have seen, acted as supercargo trading in India and China between 1718 and 1723, carried out his private trade alongside trade for the English East India Company, all of it through his Hong merchant, Pinkey Chougua, on many of his days there. One day’s order was for 570 coloured and gold plates, 160 blue and white plates, 81 punch bowls, 1,760 cups and saucers, and 200 chocolate cups. Another day’s order for lacquer included 4 tea tables, 16 hand tables, 2 sweetmeat tables, 6 smaller tea tables, and 1 oval card table.⁶³ By the 1760s ships such as the Earl of Elgin and the Neptune carried many thousands of pieces gathered in such private trade.⁶⁴ Trade on the spot was conducted via the Hong merchants on the Chinese side and the supercargoes on the British side. The supercargo who directed the British trade had to have a banker’s knowledge of foreign exchange, as well as a merchant’s ability to judge the value of his importing commodities. He was responsible for cargoes out which contained a lot of silver coinage, as well as valuable goods returning. He was amply rewarded with profits from a portion of the trade, a right to trade on his own behalf in a certain amount of silver and gold, and a privilege to carry on a ‘private trade’.⁶⁵ China’s answer to the supercargo was the Hong merchant. A guild of twelve of these was set up by the Chinese in 1720, five years after the establishment of the English factory at Canton. The Hong merchants were selected by the government and reported to the Chinese authorities.They had the right as sole agents to operate in foreign trade, and controlled the activities of any individual company merchant, arranging all trade, setting prices, ⁶² Jorg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade, 102–8; Chaudhuri, Trading World, 287; Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 59, 78. ⁶³ TNA, Chancery Masters Exhibits C112.24, Torriano. ⁶⁴ Godden, Oriental Export Market Porcelain, 91–107. ⁶⁵ J. G. Phillips, China-Trade Porcelain (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 27.

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Goods from the East and leasing factory buildings. They were also responsible for customs control, payment of commission taxes, and liaison between the Chinese authorities and foreign traders. Like the supercargoes they were handsomely rewarded.⁶⁶ They also, in the eyes of European traders, caused frequent delays, erratically demanded higher prices, and from time to time operated a cartel.⁶⁷

The Size of Chinese Trade The importance of these porcelain exports in Europe should not be underestimated. They arrested the development of tin-glazed earthenware which had diffused from Italy to Holland in the early sixteenth century. The universal appeal of the Chinese blue and white which ranged from Japan to Istanbul to Amsterdam went with the urbanized, commercial cultures of these places. Europeans’ changing food conventions and etiquette, experienced especially in northern Europe with the growth of increasingly prosperous middling ranks, made for receptive markets. Chinese imports thus dominated the ceramics trade in Europe for approximately 200 years. From the mid-eighteenth century, the rising Chinese porcelain prices provoked a new phase of ceramics innovation in Europe.The trade in Asian porcelain eventually declined.This became part of a broader shift in British and European trade with China from the mideighteenth century. Europeans’ long quest to find satisfactory substitutes for Chinese manufactured consumer goods at last started to pay off. European state policies hastened this process, as prohibitions on calico imports were introduced and duties on imported porcelain increased. From Europe’s point of view, this was just in time, for the new taste for another Chinese import, tea, was expanding rapidly.The East India Companies shifted their priorities to the import of China’s unique primary products, tea and raw silk; between 1760 and 1833 these took up 90 per cent of the total value of Chinese exports to Britain. China lost her long-standing hegemony as the world’s premier producer of manufactured consumer goods, and was downgraded to a primary producer. Simultaneously, she lost her older industrial markets in Asia to Europe and her Asian colonies.⁶⁸ This decline in China’s trade in manufactured goods with Europe be⁶⁶ Ibid. 28–33; Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities, 130. ⁶⁷ H. B. Morse, Chronicles of the East India Company Trading to China 1635–1834 (Oxford, 1926), ii. 213–15; also letters in Factory Records China and Japan 1596–1840, G/12/91, Lord Macartney’s Embassy to China. Misc. Letters, India Office Library, The British Library. ⁶⁸ Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities, 117–23.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight came part of a wider trend. The Ottoman and the Indian empires also lost their ascendancy during the mid-eighteenth century. In their case there was a loss of competitive advantage in textiles, and a reversal of bullion flows. Silk and cotton production declined in Bengal from as early as the 1730s, as it faced Chinese competition in Bombay and Madras. This was combined with the extension of direct English East India Company control over the China trade. China exploited a new comparative advantage in the luxury products of its agrarian sector—tea and raw silk—and switched to the export of primary goods.⁶⁹ Simultaneously, British and European manufacturers learned their lessons from their Asian consumer goods manufacturers, and focused their initiative on the broad middling-class markets and the production systems Asian producers were so successful in exploiting.They were ultimately able to achieve absolute technical and marketing advantage over their former Asian masters. How Britain and her European neighbours achieved this was partly a story of the marketing of Asian wares in Europe; it was also the story of successful design and production imitations of Asian wares.

Selling Asian Wares Markets for Asian goods in Europe were made both by East India Company officials and by the private traders and middlemen and retailers who grew rich off the trade. Company officials systematically developed the early association of printed calicoes and rapidly changing fashion. Networks among East India Company private traders and retailers fostered markets for Chinese porcelain and other luxury goods. Neither the Dutch nor the English East India Companies made much effort to reach consuming markets directly. This was left to wholesale dealers or to individual members of the companies. From the 1650s the English company auctioned its goods in four quarterly sales in London. It then regulated the volume of trade at the Asian end on the basis of information gathered at the sales in Amsterdam and London. The Dutch East India Company, for example, in the 1760s turned against large services, and instead sought various types of tableware painted with the same pattern which could be auctioned separately in small lots. Private trade goods were also sold at auction, in order to set correct market values for customs duty; some, designated as gifts, were exempted. Private trade was the main means by which the china dealers of the period ⁶⁹ Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities, 134; Frank, ReOrient, 117.

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Goods from the East made their special orders for all manner of dinner and tea sets, special designs, and ornamental ware.⁷⁰ This practice of selling objects of the India trade at auction continued to prevail in the marketing of luxury goods more generally, and especially of domestic ceramics.The East India Company auctions joined other auctions of painting, sculpture, books and prints, antiquities, and curiosities. Large lots were bought by middlemen who then sold to dealers who advertised large consignments in the provincial press. Private trade goods as well as other goods bought at the company auctions were subsequently sold in Europe through metropolitan and provincial china men and mercers, as well as dealers in oriental goods. London, before 1780, had 190 dealers in china and earthenware; the country as a whole had 519. London’s most important dealers operated on a large scale; several had stocks valued at £2,000–3,000. But the smaller provincial dealers with stocks valued at £300 to £700 supplied the majority of England’s rural and urban populations.⁷¹ The china men in England also advertised other East India goods, and equally Chinese porcelain was sold just as frequently by goldsmiths and toymen. Retailing was highly sophisticated, with china shops expanding rapidly both in the metropolis and in the provinces, and deploying strategies of showrooms, exclusive exhibitions, and the display of porcelain within settings conveying fashionable civility.⁷² The practices developed for selling large quantities of exotic and Asian luxury goods which arrived at European ports at relatively long intervals were adapted, but not fundamentally altered, by the appearance of domestic sources of supply. English ‘china’ was still sold in china shops, and by china men who simply added Worcester and Salopian wares to their Chinese porcelain. If selling Asian goods provided the model for new consumer goods retailing, then the products and indeed their production processes provided the models for European industrial development.

European Responses The processes developed by the Chinese ceramic and the Indian textile producers to give the rapid turnover and meet the fashion demand in Europe ⁷⁰ Chaudhuri, Trading World, 132; Jorg, Porcelain and the Dutch China Trade, 108. ⁷¹ L. Weatherill, The Growth of the Pottery Industry in England 1660–1815 (London, 1986); L. Fontaine, The History of Pedlars in Europe (Cambridge, 1996), 182–201. ⁷² Young, English Porcelain, 154–60.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight provided the models pursued by projectors and entrepreneurs as well as statesmen in Europe during the eighteenth century. At first sight European responses appeared only as rather negative mercantilist policies of high tariffs against, or outright exclusion of, Asian imports. European statesmen blamed imports of Asian luxuries for imbalances of trade. Asian consumers did not thus far see any attraction in European products. Entrepreneurs could see no immediate prospect of finding substitutes for the raw materials and foodstuffs imported from Asia, especially tea in the eighteenth century. They did, however, start numerous projects for transplanting crops, medicinal plants, and botanic species to similar climatic regions in their Caribbean and North American colonies. But these were long-term and uncertain projects. Asian manufactured goods were another matter. Could not Europeans produce similar goods in the Asian style? Thus it was that these desirable consumer goods soon faced heavy tariffs and prohibitions in Europe. Britain from the late 1680s imposed a series of restrictions, duties, and excise taxes, followed by outright prohibition of imported printed calicoes in 1700. The restrictions in England reached not just to imported wares, but to home-produced calicoes. The state bowed to vested interests in the woollen, linen, and silk industries, and imposed another prohibition in 1721 on the sale, purchase, or wearing of all printed cloth containing cotton; printers instead exercised their talents on linens, fustians, and calicoes for export. The French acted earlier, banning the import, production, and use of painted calicoes in 1686, but retracted the prohibition in 1759.The Spanish waited until the Peace of Utrecht, then in 1717 banned silks and other textiles from Asia and China, and the next year extended this to the use of all these materials. The Dutch, the German states, and the Swiss took a more liberal stance. A liberal policy on imports also spawned a local printing industry. Local textile producers protested in the Netherlands, but the Republic did not intervene, and as well as importing from Asia, there was a proliferation of calico-printing shops around Amsterdam, as well as in the German towns of Bremen, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. The French printers took refuge in the Swiss towns, establishing a French industry in exile in Neuchâtel, Lausanne, Geneva, and Basel.⁷³ These variable European state policies allowed fashion markets for these exotic fabrics to grow, and enhanced incentives for domestic production. ⁷³ J. K. J. Thomson, ‘State Intervention in the Catalan Calico-Printing Industry in the Eighteenth Century’, in M. Berg (ed.), Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (London, 1991), 57–92, p. 61.

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Goods from the East Far Eastern ceramic imports were not prohibited in Britain; the goods nevertheless faced tariffs which rose rapidly over the course of the eighteenth century. These started in 1704 at 12.5 per cent of the value at wholesale auction prices; the duty rate was approximately one-third of the sale value for sample years during the 1770s, and by the early 1790s was charged at half the auction value. Duty collected on porcelain ranged from £1,055 to £32,800 in most years of the first half of the eighteenth century; an all-time high of £104,375 was paid in 1721 on 2 million pieces of porcelain. The East India Company not only faced high tariffs, but an oligopoly of London china dealers, operating a ring to keep prices of imported porcelain artificially low. The discovery of this prompted the company’s decision to discontinue its bulk importation of porcelain.⁷⁴ Importers of lacquerware also faced heavy duties in England after 1701.The ‘Patentees for Lacquering after the manner of Japan’ secured their patents, and offered for sale ‘cabinets, secretaries, tables, stands, looking glasses, tea tables and chimney pieces’. Imports were perceived as a threat to joiners and japanners, and they argued to Parliament, ‘Many of the Artificers in the same Art and Mystery have brought it to so great a Perfection as to Exceed all manner of Indian lacquer, and to equal the right Japan[ware] itself, by enduring the fire in the Boyling of Liquors used for Japanning.’⁷⁵ These protectionist measures on some of the most rapidly growing manufactured imports did indeed foster the rapid growth of import-substituting industries. The markets for these industries had been prepared by Asian imports; a huge re-export trade (40 per cent of British exports by 1750) now absorbed high proportions of colonial imports, and new domestically produced substitutes swelled exports.

Imitations The printing of cotton in England started in the seventeenth century. In 1676 Will Sherwin petitioned for and gained a patent to print on broad cloth. But polychrome prints in fast bright colours were not possible until 1740. There were large numbers of patents in England for printing technologies, and the London base of the industry from the mid-eighteenth century faced competition from Lancashire. This import-substituting semi-luxury industry, basing its markets in the demand for printed fabrics of fine counts inspired by the Asian imports, sparked the growth of the cotton industry and the rapidly mechanizing processes which accompanied it. ⁷⁴ Young, English Porcelain, 74.

⁷⁵ Huth, Lacquer of the West, 38.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight Though there were no restrictions on the Asian trade in porcelain, the effect of the Asian imports was to inspire the rise of Europe’s great porcelain works and indigenous pottery industries. Tin-glazed approximations were available in various forms from the end of the sixteenth century. There was the Spanish and Islamic then Italian faience, distinguished by its white glaze and sparse decoration. There was Dutch delftware, and there was Dutch and English majolica, the tin-glazed ware that imitated Italian maiolica. Maiolica became one of the glories of Italian craftsmanship in the sixteenth century, and it was produced in centres all over Italy, providing the basis for civility in dining for much less than the price of silverware.The demonstration effects of the imported porcelain led the potters of Delft to specialize in imitating blue and white ware with some success from 1625. A native English majolica developed at Bristol and Liverpool, as well as at Bow and Chelsea in 1745. The other ceramics works were royal manufactories or high-luxury producers. Meissen first produced a hard red unglazed stoneware close to the red stoneware of Yi Hsing. Producers in Bayreuth, Delft, and Staffordshire followed suit and imitated these. The Meissen factory, the royal works of Saxony, made the breakthrough to produce hard-paste porcelain in 1709, and produced expensive goods in Chinese and Japanese designs. Likewise, France’s Chantilly factory which produced a soft-paste porcelain before the end of the seventeenth century was the project of an aristocrat who owned a large collection of Japanese original decorative pieces. Rouen, Vienna, Saint-Cloud, and Mennecy all followed. During the eighteenth century there were porcelain factories under the patronage and control of rulers and princelings at Sèvres, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Naples, Florence, and Vicenza. The English porcelain works, Chelsea and Bow, both took their patterns from aristocratic collections of Japanese originals. Bow called itself the ‘New Canton’.Worcester copied the Imari patterns and colours.⁷⁶ These European porcelain works did not, however, provide a substitute for Asian ceramics. They concentrated on special decorative ware; the porcelain was very expensive and was the preserve of the upper class. Manufacturers took their models from special collections, rather than the standard East India Company imports. When Boswell and Johnson visited the Derby Works in 1777, Boswell wrote, ‘The china was beautiful, but Dr. Johnson justly observed it was too dear; for that he could have vessels of silver as cheap as were here made of porcelain.’⁷⁷ Most of the Asian imports ⁷⁶ J. Mallet, ‘European Ceramics and the Influence of Japan’, in Ayers, Impey, and Mallet (eds.), Porcelain for Palaces, 38–51. ⁷⁷ William Bemrose, Bow, Chelsea and Derby Porcelain (London, 1989), 35.

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Goods from the East were much cheaper, the bulk being basic dinner and tea ware which appealed to a broad middling constituency. European earthenware manufacturers took up the challenge of responding to these; they worked to perfect a ‘creamware’ or ‘pearlware’ alternative to porcelain. British potters made this fine lead-glazed earthenware first in Staffordshire between 1730 and 1740, and quickly demonstrated its advantages over the softer, easily chipped continental tin-glazed faience and delftware. Wedgwood, only one of many creamware producers in Staffordshire, turned his attention to lightening the colour of this creamware so that it might nearly compete with porcelain. In 1763 he described this as ‘a species of earthenware for the table quite new in its appearance, covered with a rich and brilliant glaze bearing sudden alterations of heat and cold, manufactured with ease and expedition, and consequently cheap’. It was not so easily damaged as delft, and lent itself to the new simple forms of the neoclassical. He founded a prosperous export trade, replaced the manufacture of delft, and imitations of creamware became widespread. Wedgwood saw himself turning the tables on the Chinese when he wrote to Bentley in 1767, ‘The demand for this said Creamcolour, Alias Queens Ware, Alias Ivory still increases. It is really amazing how rapidly the use of it has spread allmost over the whole Globe, and how universally it is liked . . . an East Indian Captain and another Gentleman and Lady from those parts . . . ordered a Good deal of my Ware, some of it printed and gilt to take with them for presents to their friends, and for their own use. They told me it was allready in Use there, and in much higher estimation than the finest Porcellain; . . . Dont you think we shall have some Chinese Missionaries come here soon to learn the art of making Creamcolour.’⁷⁸ Equally the popularity of Japanese lacquerware also prompted imitations in Europe.Though the essential raw materials for oriental lacquers were not available in Europe, substitutes developed which also relied on the East Indies trade. The East India Company imported gum-lac or shell-lac, which formed an opaque varnish from India, and there were subsequently many patents for other substitutes. At the outset European substitutes were also luxury wares, produced in Venice from the 1660s, and from the end of the seventeenth century by the London and Paris luxury furniture makers, in the Duc de Condé’s porcelain and japanning factory, and in Amsterdam and Spa in Belgium. John Stalker’s Treatise on Japanning and Varnishing of 1688 gave recipes and detailed instructions and provided engravings of oriental patterns. The japanners were eclectic in their portrayal of Indian, ⁷⁸ A. Finer and G. Savage (eds.), The Selected Letters of Josiah Wedgwood (London, 1965), 7–9.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight Table 2.3. Patents for imitation goods and finishes, UK, 1700–1820 (good specifying imitation of Asia) Type

Number of patents

Earthenware and pottery glazes Japanning and varnishes Printing on calicoes, linen, and other textiles

7 13 48

Source: Compiled from Benet Woodcroft, Titles of Patents of Invention, Chronologically Arranged from March 2, 1617 to October 1, 1852, 2 vols. (London, 1854).

Persian, Chinese, or Japanese scenes. In eighteenth-century Paris, the preserve of furniture-makers called ‘ébénistes’, its most famed producer was the Martin firm which also experimented and patented widely in the process. There were twenty-five lacquer workshops in Venice in 1754; the number had doubled by 1773. The technique was applied to a much broader range of goods and reached a larger market during the eighteenth century. For the lacquer was applied especially to metalwares and trays, through a process of applying a black asphaltum varnish to tin-plated sheet iron, heat-drying it, then decorating it in gold and colours. The process was developed outside the court cities, in the humble provinces of Bilston, Staffordshire, then Pontypool in Wales. Henry Clay of Birmingham patented Japanned papier mâché, and his factory turned out a new semi-luxury for the middling classes, all kinds of ‘paper vases, stands, waiters, teaboards, coach panels etc. all of paper finely varnished and painted’.⁷⁹ The industry, inspired by the import of highly traditional oriental lacquers, became one of the most innovative consumer goods producers of the eighteenth century, one of the classic Birmingham trades, encompassing whole new ranges of materials and products. Between them these imitative industries became leading innovators and growth centres in the eighteenth century. Calico printers, potters, and japanners became some of the most active inventors as measured by English patent holding. The workforce of England’s seventeenth-century pottery industry was under 1,000; by 1780 it was 5,500, of which 4,000 were in north Stafford⁷⁹ J. Hardy, ‘Western Japanning 1670–1770’, in W. Watson (ed.), Lacquerwork in Asia and Beyond (London, 1982), 159–74, p. 159.

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Goods from the East shire. England’s exports of glass and earthenware expanded at respectable rates through most of the eighteenth century, then took off in the last quarter. By the end of the eighteenth century England’s creamwares were so popular that they had virtually extinguished the manufacture of tin-glazed delftware throughout Europe.⁸⁰ Wedgwood knew the special advantage of the middle market scooped by his creamware. He declared he had ‘discovered the art of making Queen’s Ware, which employs ten times more people than all the china [porcelain] in the kingdom and did not ask for a patent for this . . . Instead of one hundred manufacturers of Queen’s Ware there would have been one, and instead of an exportation to all parts of the world, a few pretty things would have been made for the amusement of the people of fashion in England.’⁸¹ Europe’s textile industries made the greatest gain. Calico printing plants spread rapidly throughout Europe in the eighteenth century, becoming by the middle of the century another basic industry, like wool and silk, seen by governments as part of any mercantilist import-substitution programme. The results were as variable as state policies across Europe, but they generated successful cotton industries in Britain, Switzerland, Belgium, and Catalonia.⁸² The great Asian manufactures which entered Europe on a large scale between the later sixteenth century and the eighteenth century brought a new kind of semi-luxury to world trade. These were novelty consumer goods, exotic in provenance and style, but domestic and endowed with the variety to display taste and individuality. They were also produced and traded at a level which made them available not just to traditional elites, but to the rapidly expanding middling and urban populations of Europe. By 1793, however, Viscount Macartney, leader of the first British trade mission to China, stood before Ch’ien-lung, the Manchu emperor, confident in Britain’s challenge to China’s achievement. He had with him what he thought to be the best and latest of British science, industry, and consumer products, a vast modern treasure trove valued at over £13,000.⁸³ He expected to impress the Chinese with the quality of these new British manufactured goods, and if not to reverse the flow of trade from China, at least to exchange British manufactures for Chinese tea. But as we know, he ⁸⁰ ‘Exports of Glass and Earthenware from England 1700–1800’, from Elizabeth Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade Statistics 1697–1808 (Oxford, 1960), table xxxvii. ⁸¹ G. Hughes, English and Scottish Earthenware 1660–1860 (London, 1961), 111. ⁸² Thomson, ‘State Intervention’, 75. ⁸³ See Colley,‘Britishness and Otherness’, 309–10. On the value of the goods taken to China see India Office Records, Factory Records China and Japan 1596–1840, G/12/92, pp. 545–86.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight was rebuffed, the scion of a barbarian land come to the centre of civilization. It was to be another forty years, after the Opium Wars, before the British forced an entry into Chinese markets. What the British gained instead, was a remarkable record of Chinese life and customs recorded on the expedition through China, in areas rarely accessed by Europeans. The travel accounts of several on the expedition as well as the hundreds of watercolours painted by the official artists, Thomas Hickey and William Alexander, of Chinese towns, rural communities, buildings, work, and costume generated continued fascination with this great culture of the East.

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3


Products of the Nation: On Art and Invention The art of seducing or pleasing to a higher degree the consumer of every kind. Postlethwayt, ‘Of Arts and Manufactories’

Characteristics, Quality, and New Products Importation of exotic consumer goods, especially from Asia, prompted a rethinking of the features of consumer goods produced in Britain. The result of this creative interaction was the invention of new products which came to form the basis of an identifiably British consumer goods sector during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thinking about goods, not in the abstract, as many economists have done, as a combination of prices and quantities, but as the physical, cultural, and symbolic properties of individual goods, provides the vital spur to a process of ‘unpacking’ the commodity. Any individual good, or set of goods, can be seen as embodying ‘characteristics’, including quality and fashion differences which consumers actively respond to, promoting new products and recombining characteristics of old and new goods. While so much of the recent history of consumption in the eighteenth century has focused on the role of demand and on new consumer aspirations, it gives little consideration to consumer goods themselves. The goods are frequently grouped, and described in minimalist form, as imported luxuries, necessities, foodstuffs, colonial groceries, textiles, or clothing. Careful attention to the characteristics of goods, clusters of physical attributes, qualities, and aesthetic principles opens consideration of the diversity and variety of goods and the part played by product innovation in creating a consumer goods sector. Product ~ 85 ~

Luxury, Quality, and Delight innovation occurs when a previously unobtainable good can be made, or an existing product is improved; process innovation, by contrast, occurs when a good of given characteristics can be produced at lower cost. Product innovation has come to be recognized recently as an important aspect of manufacturing growth and productivity change. It is now time to consider its central part in eighteenth-century invention. The Boulton and Watt steam engine has long ranked as the key indicator to historians of eighteenth-century invention and ingenuity. But pride of place during the eighteenth century itself was given to an explosion of new, intricate consumer goods from silver-plated coffee pots to stamped brassware and japanned papier maché tea trays. Manufacturers and retailers patented and celebrated consumer goods and endowed them with admired eighteenth-century attributes of ‘convenience’, ‘ingenuity’, ‘novelty’, ‘taste’, and ‘style’. Along with quality, variety and novelty feature as central to the characteristics of goods. Consumers are not passive price takers, but active participants in taste formation, in generating new goods, and in combining and recombining new and existing goods to create a social identity and a lifestyle. Variety and novelty linked to fashion change have been credited with inducing increasing work effort; taking this further, the variety associated with fashion change could provide for more ‘sensual arousal’ for any given stock of goods. More durable consumer goods that became more attractive could induce substitution of expenditure away from necessaries; historians argue that this is indeed what happened in the eighteenth century.¹ Customers now sought variety, and writers from early in the century explored its effects on the senses. Hogarth defined variety as one of the key principles of beauty. Variety excited ‘the lively feeling of wantonness and play’. He argued that we tire of symmetry, and that the faculties associated with variety and intricacy are higher, more complex and creative.This aspiration for variety caused consumers not only to display more and richer possessions, but to seek constant changes in the types and characteristics of goods.² This was a market which interacted with the invention not immediately of processes, but of products. The rapid growth of the middling classes over ¹ De Vries, ‘Between Purchasing Power’, 85–132; H. J. Voth, ‘Work and the Sirens of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century London’, in M. Bianchi (ed.), The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice (London, 1998), 143–73. ² William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. with introd. by R. Paulson (New Haven, 1997); Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain 1550–1960 (New Haven, 1995), 200–2; Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Regime (London, 1996), 5–7.

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Products of the Nation the period led the market.This group sought out consumer goods signalling individuality and self-differentiation through visual diversity. Ornament, colour, and finish were key parts of variety, and lighter, less durable products could be changed more frequently. The retail trade also expressed the enthusiasm for variety and novelty, and retailers competed vigorously over the advertisement and display of a wide variety of goods. Advertisement, naming, and listing of consumer goods in all manner of writings concerned with commercial exchange diffused ideas and images of the goods, established names and practices, and ‘helped to spread the seductions of consumerism’.³ Retailing through a large number of places of exchange and displaying large stocks of goods conveyed the individual features of objects and the diverse conditions of their production and consumption. Market pressures such as these, in turn, prodded manufacturers into generating new varieties—in shapes, textures, functions, and finish, as well as entirely new products.⁴ The supply of this variety might involve standardized components and production to standardized dimensions, but still allow the growth of product diversity. There could be a relatively tight definition of product types, but the possibility of wide product ranges. Equally, the attempt to produce to standardized specifications, under batch and hand methods of production, inevitably culminated in the production of diverse qualities. Managing the market to sell these goods in various distinct formats involved capitalizing on a fragmented market. Dealing with the diverse qualities of any output entailed the creative marketing of ‘variety’.⁵ Quality and variety together introduced other aspects of product development during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Two central and connected features were aesthetics and national frameworks. Luxury markets and display as well as luxury and craft production were ornaments of court culture and demonstrated national power. Charles I tried to confine the trade of Cheapside to the goldsmiths; this was the main route through the City of London, and part of the processional parade for diplomats and visiting royalty. The glitter of the goldsmiths’ shop windows demonstrated to all the wealth and power of London. Similarly Europe’s courts and princelings from the early eighteenth century displayed wealth and power through the patronage of porcelain factories at Sèvres, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Naples, Florence, and Vicenza as well as Meissen; porcelain was the ³ P. C. Reynard, ‘Manufacturing Quality in the Pre-industrial Age: Finding Value in Diversity’, Economic History Review, 53 (Aug. 2000), 493–516, p. 511. ⁴ Styles, ‘Manufacturing, Consumption and Design’, 533. ⁵ Reynard, ‘Manufacturing Quality’, 510–11.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight new gold, and a symbol of absolutism.⁶ Discussions of quality, taste, and style became issues of national debate, and attention focused not just on elite luxuries, but on the wider range of consumer goods. National power was reflected in a strong domestic consumer goods sector and a growing export sector. The ‘arts’, as manufacture and technology, but also the fine arts, as design, taste, and fashion, contributed to the aesthetics of goods, but they were also important to national representations and policies. Art and industry were coupled in an eighteenth-century British context as a national response to the expansion of the international luxury and consumer goods trade. The quality of native manufactured goods became a priority of national policy; the arts and art techniques were applied to manufactures, and modern design was combined with technical innovation. Aesthetics was a characteristic of consumer goods as these were perceived in the eighteenth century, and artists and economic commentators discussed the principles of aesthetic appeal. Aesthetics was as important to the demand for goods as were durability, functionality, simplicity of production, portability, or price. An eighteenth-century science of taste dictated the principles of aesthetics. Taste was a refinement of discernment and a training in the art of detecting quality. Philosophers and artists debated enlightened education in good taste as well as the training of artists. Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) took up the principles of beauty and elegance and discussed these as sources of pleasure. He identified form, colour, variety or rarity, and imitation as key principles of beauty, but drew particular attention to ‘fitness’ and ‘imitation’. Fitness was about the aesthetic appeal in objects of ingenuity and utility. Imitation was a source of wonder ‘at seeing an object of one kind represent so well an object of a very different kind’. He gave an example of a Dutch still life painting of an old carpet, where the painting was valued more highly than the original carpet.⁷ Artists, notably William Hogarth in his Analysis of Beauty (1753), Alexander Gerard in his Essay on Taste (1752), and Joshua Reynolds in his seventh discourse (delivered in 1776, but first published in 1759) debated principles of beauty. Hogarth’s key principles of beauty were fitness, variety, uniformity, simplicity, and intricacy. He sought to displace moral judgement with an aesthetics of sensation and pleasure based in nature. He ⁶ Helen Clifford, ‘A Commerce with Things: The Value of Precious Metalwork in Early Modern England’, in Berg and Clifford (eds.), Consumers and Luxury, 147–69; Michael Vickers, ‘Value and Simplicity: Eighteenth-Century Taste and the Study of Greek Vases’, Past and Present, 116 (1987), 98–137. ⁷ See N. De Marchi and H. J. Van Miergroet, ‘Ingenuity, Preference and the Pricing of Pictures: The Smith–Reynolds Connection’, in N. De Marchi and C. D. W. Goodwin (eds.), Economic Engagements with Art (Durham, NC, 1999), 379–412, pp. 386–8, 392, 404.

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Products of the Nation argued that we have in our nature a love of imitation from our infancy: ‘the eye is entertained, as well as surprised with mimicry and delighted with the exactness of counterparts’. But he thought we had a superior love of variety: ‘the shapes and colours of plants, flowers, leaves and butterflies’ wings . . . entertain the eye with the pleasures of variety.’⁸ Gerard and Reynolds discussed the making of a community of taste. Only the imagination varied, and combined ideas furnished via the senses. Students of painting found their creativity in a strong grounding in extensive copying; ‘by selective imitation, we come to grasp the “ruling characteristic” of a painting.’⁹ This idea of creativity in the arts was very similar to contemporary ideas of invention, as expressed by Diderot in the Encyclopédie. Invention, in his view, was a cumulative, collective process based in imitation. It was a discovery of the relations between nature and the arts—echoes, analogies, and ‘liaisons’.¹⁰ Adam Smith pursued the analysis of imitation in aesthetics. He argued that we take pleasure in the ingenuity of imitation, and in the role of the imagination in bridging the gap between the natural sphere and the artificial representation. Imaginative connection and imaginative leaps explained our fascination with imitation materials. Pinchbeck, he argued, was virtually equal to gold in colour, and paste and glass jewellery not far short of the brilliance of real gems, and ‘French plate’ close to the splendour of silver. Aesthetic principles which valued fitness, variety, and imitation favoured the development of new products which could play the part of new luxuries. These commodities were marked by variety and novelty, they gave pleasure in their ‘fitness’, and in their creative ‘imitation’ they brought taste and distinction to a broad group of middling-class consumers. The British linked the imitation of oriental luxury goods, practised across Europe in porcelain, silk, calico printing, and lacquer works, to new technologies and new materials to produce an inventive reinterpretation of traditional principles. British lead glass crystal and Staffordshire creamware, imitations of Venetian glass and oriental porcelain, were made in coal-fired glasshouses and kilns; stamped brassware, silver plate and ormolu, japanned tinware, and papier mâché deployed a new chemistry of metal alloys and also mechanical techniques of rolling, stamping, and moulding. ⁸ Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 29; Alexander Gerard, Essay on Taste (London, 1756); Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art (2nd edn., London, 1997). ⁹ Cited in De Marchi and Van Miergroet, ‘Ingenuity, Preference’, 386–8; J. Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, 1986), 88. ¹⁰ L. Hilaire-Pérez, ‘Diderot’s Views on Artists’ and Inventors’ Rights: Invention, Imitation and Reputation’, British Journal for the History of Science, 35 (2002), 129–50.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight

Fig. 3.1. Knowledge, judgment, wit, and taste. The values of The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. Birmingham Central Library.

A response to Asian luxury remained important in these debates; this was best summed up in an entry on the fine arts in Ackerman’s Repository of the Arts in 1809. ‘The love of the ornamental and imitative arts is so interwoven with the moral existence of man, that there is scarcely any part of the world but is more or less cheered by their general influence . . . We are not to suppose that the several modes of art migrated, like man himself, from country ~ 90 ~

Products of the Nation to country . . . more nations than one may justly claim the honour of having invented the arts of modelling, engraving, sculpture and painting.’ It appears, ‘from history and indisputable facts, that modelling and engraving and perhaps sculpture in relievo were practised in the more eastern countries for ages before, and while the Greeks were yet in a state of barbarism’.¹¹ Principles of aesthetics which allowed for admiration for industrial replication opened a national debate on the relations between the arts and manufactures. Making consumer goods became a national project.This was debated in Britain, and there were certainly parallel debates in France. But British policy-makers, commercial writers, and projectors in the eighteenth century set a priority on developing the quality and design of British goods in order to compete, especially with France.

Making Consumer Goods: A National Project An earlier historiography accepted a division between art history and economic history. Art historians wrote of a public sphere for the cultivation of art and politeness that was separated off from the market. And they wrote little of the commercial applications of the arts.¹² The economic historians of the 1960s also typecast Britain as a place of mechanical process innovation and standardized consumer goods, in contrast to France, which they associated with taste, style, and variety of goods. Twentieth-century accounts rarely mentioned the contribution of the arts in relation to British industrial change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These accounts replicated the distinction drawn by Alfred Marshall between French and British social structures, and with this a French consumer market based in luxury and fashion, and a British one based in substantial simple goods and solid comforts. The difference in consumer markets went with different production processes. ‘More and more did her [France’s] best artisans specialize themselves on work that called for individual taste and thought as regards form, arrangement and colour: meanwhile English artisans were specializing themselves rather on work that required strength, resolution, judgment, persistence, power to obey and to command, and with all an abundant use of capital.’¹³ ¹¹ R. Ackerman, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions and Politics (London, 1809), entry on Fine Arts, pp. 69–71. ¹² This point is made by Matthew Craske in Art in Europe 1700–1830 (Oxford, 1997), 187–216; David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, 1992), provides an exemplary study of art and the public sphere. ¹³ Alfred Marshall, Industry and Trade (London, 1921), 111.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight The sharp divide between the development paths of Britain and France as set out by Marshall has continued to pervade the approach to the history of luxury and consumer goods production in both countries. France has been identified with elite luxuries, the court, and patronage of the arts; Britain with ordinary commodities for middling- and lower-class consumers.¹⁴ This separation is now challenged by France’s historians.The display associated with Versailles and the aristocratic elite of the court has been displaced by the much broader discussion of the fashion economy of Paris which provided semi-luxury and low-cost goods to a widening market as well as providing for the exclusive elite consumers.¹⁵ Britain’s historians have been slower to confront their favourite technological and economic theories. These leave by the wayside the appearance of new and various commodities.The British industrial revolution, as we know it, is about technology rather narrowly defined; it is not about the role of the arts or aesthetic aspects of the history of goods. This was not the view taken by contemporaries; on the contrary, they saw themselves embarking on a national project to create quality consumer goods.They looked to the arts for the design and taste to make British goods that would substitute for luxury imports from Asia and the rest of Europe, and which would become exports in their own right. There is no doubt that mercantilist policies played their part in framing this approach to the arts. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century it was difficult to buy foreign manufactured imports without paying high tariffs, especially those from France. Some goods such as Indian cottons and French silks were entirely prohibited. During the eighteenth century the import of French china faced heavy duties, and commercial importation was prohibited until 1775; from then until Eden’s Commercial Treaty with France in 1786, it faced a duty of 150 per cent. Great efforts were made by the state, projectors, and entrepreneurs to promote and to start up these foreign forms of manufacture in England. It is difficult to ascribe intentions—were these simply to make English copies, which, in the hothouse climate of tariff walls, were bound ultimately to fail in a freer international economy? Or was it the practice, if not the intention, to manufacture and to establish new products successful ¹⁴ See e.g. P. K. O’Brien and C. Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France 1780–1914 (London, 1976); François Crouzet, ‘England and France in the Eighteenth Century: A Comparative Analysis of Two Economic Growths’, in R. M. Hartwell (ed.), The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England (London, 1967), 53–80; William Sewell, Work and Revolution in Nineteenth Century France (Cambridge, 1982). ¹⁵ See the critique of Auslander, Taste and Power, by Dena Goodman in ‘Furnishing Discourses’. See Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon (Harmondsworth, 2002), 349–63.

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Products of the Nation enough to generate not just domestic markets, but their own international markets? Economic commentators set out their own views on the national attributes of British and French manufacture, and the measures to be taken to improve British commodities. This usually entailed close linkages to the arts and improved design. They stressed the role of the arts, especially drawing, modelling, and engraving, in debates extending over much of the eighteenth century. British policy-makers engaged, especially between the 1740s and the 1760s, in intense debate on promoting art education. Competing for markets and colonies with Europe’s largest economy, with its population of 24 million by the 1740s, Britain was at war with France twice and for half the years of these decades.¹⁶ French design led Europe at the time, and French imports were popular luxuries. Britain’s traditional export markets in woollen cloth were in relative decline, but her manufacturing sector on the broad front was growing. Promoting a more diversified manufacturing sector was one way of responding to a downturn in woollen exports to Europe. Britain’s woollen exports declined from 85 per cent of her manufactured exports in 1700 to 61.9 per cent by 1750; exports of metals and metal goods rose from 3.2 per cent in 1700 to 9.2 per cent, and a residual category which did not include other textiles increased from 9 to 21 per cent. Her exports were at this point being reorientated from Europe to the Americas, and so too her imports. Imports from other parts of the world, especially Asia, only rose gradually as a proportion of her total imports over the period between 1700 and 1770.¹⁷ Fashion and luxury imports from Europe, especially France and Asia, had high political and cultural profiles, though they made little showing in the national accounts. The debate on British commodities was to a much greater degree a part of the wider debate on British trade and empire. London was at the hub of this commercial empire, and was the centre for the distribution if not the production of luxury and middling-class consumer goods; it also serviced an extensive mercantile, commercial, and bureaucratic class as well as a largescale annual influx of noblemen.¹⁸ Adam Anderson argued the special contribution of commerce to ‘the Britannic Empire’ ‘for its Opulence and Grandeur;—its Improvements in Arts and Knowledge—and in general, for the great Bulk of its solid Comforts and Conveniencies’. He acknowledged the challenge of France, despite the setbacks of the Seven Years War. ‘She is ¹⁶ Jones, The Great Nation, 164. ¹⁷ Stanley Engerman,‘Mercantilism and Overseas Trade, 1700–1800’, in R. Floud and D. McCloskey (eds.), The Economic History of Britain since 1700, 3 vols. (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1994), i. Tables 4, 6, 7. ¹⁸ Colley, Britons, 56–65.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight possessed, and has long so been, of very many great and rich Manufactures;—and still many lucrative foreign Plantations and Factories.’¹⁹ France was perceived to have major state initiatives to develop its arts and design; while in Britain much of this was left to the market.The close association of Colbert and other French ministers with the development of state manufactories and the immigration of skilled craft labour accounted for the rapid development of its tapestry, silk, wool, and glass manufactures.The English were urged to follow this French model.²⁰ In 1764, Robert Dossie counselled the improvement of the arts and design through an Academy similar to that of the French. He argued that France had ‘such a judgment and taste in design among all classes of artisans, as render France at this time, the source of nearly all inventions of fashions; and necessarily occasion an extreme great demand from her of all those articles in the production of which such talents are exercised’. The British needed to excel in cultivating manufactures of a ‘more refined nature; where skill and taste are required to give a higher value to the work, and to stand in the place of a greater proportion of manual operation’.²¹ He argued that British superiority in machines and manual dexterity needed to add design initiative before Britain could rival France. These arguments were made again and again as a rapidly expanding print culture now found ways of conveying the message, not just in political and economic tracts, but in weekly journals, commercial and industrial dictionaries and encyclopedias, and in a whole new and extensive range of publications related to design—books of ornament, prints, pattern and drawing books, and treatises on design. The perceived success of the French was attributed not to workmanship or materials, but to fashion and to ornamentation. Catching up with France was thus not about the technology, but about the products. It was French goods that were seen as a threat, but with adequate attention to the arts, French design initiative might be adapted and recombined to produce a British national taste.²² ¹⁹ Adam Anderson, An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time, 2 vols. (London, 1764), i. p. viii. ²⁰ The Wonders of Nature and Art: Being an Account of Whatever is Most Curious and Remarkable throughout the World, 4 vols. (London, 1750), i. 169–84. ²¹ Robert Dossie, The Handmaid of the Arts, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1764), i. p. vi. ²² Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (London, 1993), 138–40; Anne Puetz, ‘Design Instruction for Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal of Design History, 12 (1999), 217–41, pp. 217–18, 225. Also see Matthew Craske, ‘Plan and Control: Design and the Competitive Spirit in Early and Mid-Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Design History, 12 (1999), 187–216, pp. 196–205, on the national framework of the debate on design.

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Products of the Nation Writers from the mid-eighteenth century drew attention to a widespread consumer demand across Europe, but also in places of European settlement in America and Asia, for quality consumer goods and luxury manufactures— ‘for using those decorations and ornaments in dress, as well as buildings, equipages and furniture that employ the arts of design’. Dossie explained this as a spread of luxury from the East to the West, and urged that developing these manufactures would become the means of supplanting the former trade in such goods. The long association of France with design skills and luxury manufactures, and of Britain with mechanical techniques and conveniences, was already a major political issue in the mid-eighteenth century. British policy-makers and projectors looked to the means to develop national taste and a design role for the arts in order to displace a perceived French and Asian advantage. They promoted state or private institutional support through premiums and patents, and especially through the foundation of design academies, most notably the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, founded in 1753. This was a private initiative, and there was soon a parallel organization in Dublin. William Shipley, the Society’s founder, argued that riches were ‘the strength, and arts and sciences the ornaments of nations’.²³ The French Académie was seen as the source of French ornament and fashion, and the British needed a parallel institution. The British, it was believed, had become too dependent on French refugees, and there were no facilities for training comparable to those in France.²⁴ The Society of Arts was based in the movement to create an English style in manufactures, and to establish an appropriate national commercial identity. The society was anticipated in 1745 by the Anti-Gallican Association, founded ‘to promote British Manufactures, to extend the commerce of England, to discourage the introduction of French modes and oppose the importation of French commodities’. The Society of Arts did not deny things French, but searched for ways of appropriating French success in luxury manufacture. It aimed to combine design and the fine arts together with the mechanical and commercial arts.The society opposed patents as the way to promote invention. It regarded these as forms of monopoly, and instead it offered one-off premiums to inventors and improvers: for designs for weaving, embroidery and calico printing, for cabinet and coach making, and for manufacture in china, earthenware, iron and brass, or ‘any other ²³ Shipley, cited in D. G. C. Allan, William Shipley, Founder of the Royal Society of Arts (London, 1968), 16, 46, 51. ²⁴ Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth Century Decoration, 139–40.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight Mechanic Trade that requires Taste’. The society conceived a close connection between creating new British products and inventing. It sought to improve design, to invent British luxuries, and to discover new uses for indigenous and British colonial raw materials. It offered premiums for innovation in art techniques that could be applied to manufactures, especially in engraving, mezzotinting, etching, modelling, bronze casting, mechanical drawing, and architectural and furniture designs.²⁵ The society’s project was part of a broader movement to create in Britain ‘an economy of quality’ in response to Asian and French luxury. This quality manufacture would combine the fine arts and design with modern manufacturing technique.

Art, Design, and Fashion in Economic and Political Thought There was a context for this national project of developing the commercial arts for application to higher-quality British consumer goods. This was a long-standing theme in economic and political ideas going back to the later seventeenth century, and in the practical development of design skills between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The French were leaders of textile design, especially in silks, through the implementation of a fashion cycle. But this design ascendancy was not created by the individual craftsman; it was an R&D initiative made through the collaboration of marchands-merciers based in Paris, and textile manufacturers in Lyons. From the seventeenth century heavy capital investment went into design studios and into the training of designers and decorators. The design studio introduced the principle of continuous design change as a response to the competitive pressures of emulation, imitation, outright copying, and design theft. The design studio turned out new designs, and altered old designs in its archive. A firm’s archive was a major capital asset, as the whole design system relied on the practice of taking inspiration from existing designs and adapting ideas. Merchants were constantly in touch with manufacturers, advising ways of changing samples to suit differentials in taste. The manipulation of fashion through constant design change gave power to those who could produce a constant run of design innovation, and to those who could respond rapidly to these.²⁶ Capital invested in the design studio ²⁵ D. G. C. Allan, The Virtuoso Tribe of Arts and Sciences: Studies in the Eighteenth Century Work and Membership of the London Society of Arts (Athens, Ga., 1992), 91–119. ²⁶ Carlo Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production: The Strategies of the Lyons Silk Merchants in the Eighteenth Century’, in C. Sabel and J. Zeitlin (eds.), World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge, 1997), 37–74, p. 50; L. Miller, ‘Paris–Lyons–Paris: Dialogue in the Design and Distribution of Patterned Silks in the Eighteenth Century’, in R. Fox and A. Turner (eds.), Luxury Trades and Consumerism in Ancien Regime Paris (Aldershot, 1998), 139–68, pp. 163–5.

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Products of the Nation

Fig. 3.2. Society of Arts Premium: Miss Hannah Chambers. 1757 design for a candelabra. ‘For the best design by girls under 17 years’. Royal Society of Arts.

complemented careful attention to training of artisans. The silk weavers drew on close complementarities among the luxury trades and close connections with the fine arts. Young designers were trained in the workshops of the flower painters or the Gobelins painters. Even after they returned to Lyons, they still spent long periods in Paris each year, immersing themselves in the elegance and luxury of palaces, gardens, art collections, theatre, and other luxury goods trades.Their taste and sensibility were refined, and close ~ 97 ~

Luxury, Quality, and Delight contacts were also maintained with the merchants of the great silk warehouses.²⁷ While industrial design studios on this scale, integrated with training in the royal manufactories, were not developed in Britain, there was widespread use from as early as the sixteenth century of engravings as a form of design tool. These were adapted by goldsmiths, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries printed ornament also originated in London and was applied across the luxury trades. Printed design and ornament expanded with manufacturing itself and the luxury goods trades. Since the London print trade itself expanded rapidly through the eighteenth century, rising to European dominance by the end of the period, many of these prints and pattern books originated in London.²⁸ Printed design material, however, still had to be adapted, developed, and used for further innovation. Designers and manufacturers perceived a lack of skills in freehand drawing in Britain in the 1730s to 1750s, a period when the rococo, based in variety, ornament, and asymmetry, dominated fashion. Those who suggested ways of improving the quality and design of British goods thus focused first on drawing skills, then modelling. Modelling skills could be transferred across objects and materials. Those who worked in casting moulds in metals had close affinities with those in woodcarving and in ceramics, and modellers frequently moved from the silversmithing and engraving trades, as well as from the trades and arts in sculpted ornament.²⁹ With drawing and modelling came engraving with its applications widely explored across all types of print media as well as the decoration and ornamentation of metals, ceramics, glassware, textiles, and wallpaper. Just at the time that many called for the closer integration of the arts into British manufactures, those manufactures were increasingly subdivided, mechanized, and replicated. While many celebrated this mechanical, chemical, and organizational ingenuity, it also sat uncomfortably with ideas of taste, design, and the application of the fine arts. Campbell in his The London Tradesman argued that specialization gave England ‘an Advantage over many Foreign Nations as they are obliged to employ the same hand in every branch of the trade, and it is impossible to expect that a man employed in such an infinite variety can finish his work to any perfection, as least, not ²⁷ Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production’, 64. ²⁸ John Styles, ‘The Goldsmiths and the London Luxury Trades, 1550–1750’, in David Mitchell (ed.), Goldsmiths, Silversmiths and Bankers: Innovation and the Transfer of Skill, 1550–1750 (London, 1995), 112–20, p. 116; Tim Clayton, The English Print 1688–1802 (New Haven, 1997). ²⁹ Helen Clifford ‘Making Luxuries: The Image and Reality of Luxury Workshops in 18thCentury London’, in P.S. Barnwell, M. Palmer and M. Airs (eds.), The Vernacular Workshop: from Craft to Industry, 1400‒1900 (York, 2004), 17–27.

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Products of the Nation so much as he who is constantly employed in one thing’.³⁰ But just as manufacturers highlighted drawing, design, and modelling skills and the application of art techniques to manufacture, so they turned away from saying too much about the division of labour, and the techniques of industrial replication. Wedgwood, in marketing his products, advertised ‘antique designs’, not division of labour, factory organization, or cheap moulded earthenware. He wrote to his partner, Bentley about the parts of a classical frieze: ‘I know they are much cheaper at that price than marble & in every way better, but people will not compare things which they conceive to be made out of moulds, or perhaps stamp’d at a blow like the Birmingham articles, with carving and natural stones where they are certain no moulding, casting, or stamping can be done’.³¹ Economic and commercial writers, artists, and inventors all expressed this tension between mechanical ingenuity in production processes on the one hand and the aesthetic principles and design of goods on the other. The term ‘art’ itself during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries included what we now divide into art and technology. John Cary wrote of art as the ability to construct, fabricate, or manufacture—‘by manufactures we improve the labour of our inhabitants, and make them useful in sundry means’ for which ‘without the help of art they would not have been proper’. Petty wrote that Holland had taken away the English superiority in manufacturing cloth ‘by becoming able to work with more art’. Malachy Postlethwayt wrote extensively about art in relation to ‘ingenious labour’. But it was David Hume who distinguished the ‘mechanical or industrial arts’ from the ‘liberal or refined arts’. He saw art as supplanting labour by producing a flow of wealth through a nation’s social structure, which would then produce a refinement in the ‘liberal arts’.³² Most contemporary writers assumed that technology included art techniques, which would play a part in the quality and appearance of goods. Postlethwayt, in his dissertation ‘Of Arts and Manufactories’, argued that the superior progress of the nation depended on a superior degree of consumption. He stressed the importance of the ‘art of seducing or pleasing to a higher degree the consumer of every kind’.This entailed producing different qualities of products. ‘To tempt and please them all, it is proper to offer them assortments of every kind proportioned to their different abilities in point of purchase’, and ‘assortments of different prices of the same stuff, are ³⁰ R. Campbell, The London Tradesman (London, 1747; repr. 1969), 142. ³¹ Wedgwood Papers, 1778. Cited in Clifford, ‘Thinking and Writing’, 22. ³² E. A. J. Johnson, ‘The Mercantilist Concept of “Art” and “Ingenious Labour” ’, Economic Journal Supplement (1930–3), 234–53, pp. 241–51.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight a very proper means of helping them [merchants] to a reasonable gain’. He drew attention to the importance of ‘how to make goods look well’. For this, a state ‘must have its mechanics excel’—‘if her workmen are not ingenious and skilful they will not be able to hit the taste of foreign purchasers; to tempt them with new inventions, or imitate those of other nations; nor, in short, to satisfy the various humours and caprices of consumers.’³³ Other encyclopedists debated the distinctions between the polite, literary, or liberal arts and the mechanic or useful arts, and journals investigated useful knowledge. Croker’s Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1764–6) argued that the divide between the liberal and mechanic arts was the product of the social division of labour. ‘The mechanic arts, depending upon manual operation and confined to a certain beaten track, are assigned over to those persons whom prejudices place in a lower class . . . But the advantage of the liberal over the mechanic arts, from employing the operations of the mind and from the difficulty of excelling therein, is sufficiently balanced by the greater utility most commonly arising from the mechanic arts.’³⁴ William Kenrick alluded to ‘artists’ with reference to the ‘scientific useful arts’; he argued the case for their equity with authors and engravers, and suggested that parliament should give them extensions of terms for patents for their inventions.³⁵ ‘Useful knowledge’ and the ‘useful arts’ were common tropes across this commercial print culture. Erasmus Middleton called his dictionary a ‘universal system of useful knowledge’, and claimed that it offered a cheap and rapid diffusion of such knowledge. The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, a journal addressed to gentlemen, in 1758 argued the case for the public utility of the mechanic arts which not only gave employment to the bulk of the people, but ‘civilized’ the artificers, whose minds are ‘thereby closely engaged about inventions beneficial to mankind in general’. ‘Artificers never want opportunities of exerting and improving their intellectual facilities; and accordingly it has often been observed that skilful mechanics are usually men of good understanding’.³⁶ When contributors to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1778 distinguished between the polite and the human arts—‘the end of all arts is pleasure; ³³ Malachy Postlethwayt, ‘Of Arts and Manufactories’, Dissertation XXXIII of Britain’s Commercial Interest Explained and Improved, ii. 402–11. ³⁴ Revd Temple Henry Croker, The Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 3 vols. (London, 1765–6), p. viii. ³⁵ William Kenrick, An Address to the Artists and Manufacturers of Great Britain: Respecting an Application to Parliament of New Discoveries and Invention in the Useful Arts (London, 1774). ³⁶ Erasmus Middleton, The New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences or an Universal System of Useful Knowledge (London, 1778); The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, ed. J. Hinton, vol. 17 (London, 1758), 2.

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Products of the Nation whereas the end of the sciences is instruction and utility’—they still wrote of the equal contributions of both to technologies and goods. They argued that some of the polite arts are applied to objects that are useful or instructive. In these, although the ‘sciences which employ the understanding’ were crucial, the expression arose from the inventive faculty. Beauty was important to many objects, and needed to be defined; it was also produced by the same mental faculties as genius and invention. These encyclopedists argued that the perfections which produce beauty consist principally in the agreeable and delightful proportions which are found (1) between the several parts of the same object, (2) between each part and the whole together, and (3) between the parts and the end or design of the object to which they belong. This understanding of what Smith had called ‘fitness’ contributed to invention: ‘Taste, disposition or rather the natural sensation of the mind refined by art, serves to guide the genius in discerning, embracing and producing that which is beautiful of every kind . . . it is this knowledge, this theory which the modern philosophers call by the Latin name of aesthetica’.³⁷ Many of the encyclopedias and dictionaries were closely associated with the Society of Arts, and they all attempted to promote invention and national taste. Many of them contained extensive articles on processes of the decorative arts which could be applied to luxury and semi-luxury manufacture in which Britain might develop its own international pre-eminence. Most of the dictionaries contained articles on architecture, dyeing, enamelling, engraving, etching, gilding, glassmaking, glazing, japanning, mezzotint, moulding, painting, porcelain, sculpture, tapestry, and varnishes; these attempted to describe the skills as well as the design involved.The encyclopedias were seen as means of communicating knowledge. They would convey a universal language of the arts, breaking down the mysteries of the trades and the particularities of knowledge.³⁸ One of those ways of communicating knowledge was through graphical representation. Many of the encyclopedias and dictionaries contained extensive sets of engravings, which often represented machines and technical processes. Engraving was one of those arts many of them were promoting; the Universal Magazine commissioned sets of engravings that appeared in later dictionaries, and many of these were embellished with national symbols of the cooperation of art and industry. This two-dimensional representation of technologies was the means of spreading a knowledge of existing techniques, of conveying ³⁷ Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10 vols. (2nd edn., Edinburgh, 1778–83), i. 715–17. ³⁸ John Barrow, A New and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1751), 2.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight mechanical principles, and stimulating improvement. Such access to knowledge of existing crafts and practices provided the key to their ‘recombination into novel hybrids’.³⁹ It was also a way of making that knowledge more accessible: ‘graphical representation was a mechanism to make “thick” (complex) reality into something “thin” (that is comprehensible)’.⁴⁰ This technical representation depended on drawing skills, which contemporaries in turn believed to be the source of mechanical ingenuity and aesthetic sensibility. The emphasis on drawing and graphic representation connected to the expansion of print culture in general, with printers engaged in the production of books, journals, pamphlets, and newspapers, as well as of almanacks and topographies, dictionaries and encyclopedias, commercial and legal documents, and of advertising, especially trade bills and trade cards. Pattern books and trade catalogues as well as trade bills and trade cards used cheap engraving and reproduction as an advertising medium; these diffused embellishment and ornament as well as technical drawings.With the extension of cheap engravings, there was also a new market in technical drawing aids. Learning perspective and representing three-dimensional space were seen as means to self-improvement in the building and cabinetmaking trades and in many others.⁴¹ Postlethwayt emphasized the importance of drawing and of printed engravings. His essay on Print (1757) suggested that the English organize cycles of historical prints. Such cycles would ‘encourage drawing without which neither the genius nor learning of the designer, painter or sculptor can be displayed to advantage’. The prints would also give ‘public encouragement to all our own subjects who shall excel in design, engraving and painting . . . we may become exporters as well of the productions of our own celebrated masters, as importers of those of other countries’.⁴² He suggested an academy for the fine arts, arguing that the arts of drawing were a longneglected matter of concern. A special campaign on drawing was the first initiative of the Society of Arts when it was founded in 1753. Shipley, the leading founder of the society, had a special interest since he ran a private drawing school. A good advertisement for Shipley’s aims was provided by ³⁹ Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002), 62. ⁴⁰ This point is made by Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms, Enlightenment and the Making of Modern France (Princeton, 1997), cited in Mokyr, Gifts of Athena, 63 n. ⁴¹ Craske, ‘Plan and Control’, 191. ⁴² Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce. Translated from the French of . . . Monsieur Savary . . . with large additions and improvements, ‘Printing from Copper Plates’, 2 vols. (2nd edn., London, 1757), vol. ii.

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Products of the Nation Ozias Humphrey, who attended Shipley’s school in order to learn to draw patterns for the family lace business:‘the reason of my being so eager to enter myself at Mr. Shipley’s School was because I knew that the drawing of Heads etc. must give me a truer Idea in Drawing Lace Patterns’.⁴³ The society proposed rewards for the encouragement of boys and girls in the art of drawing, and awarded these for the best pieces of drawing from those under 16. It drew practising artists into its membership to promote these, and to judge the awards. Premiums in the Polite Arts category in 1758 were provided for young persons according to a schedule ranging from life figures to copying prints, as well as offers of premiums for drawing of designs for a whole range of products. Robert Dossie’s Handmaid of the Arts continued to advertise these awards, and also proposed an Academy for youth, novices, and artists themselves for further study. Dossie thought that rewards and distinctions should be offered for the applications of the arts to perfecting manufactures.⁴⁴ He and others deployed a rhetoric of drawing, design, and industry. Some used the rhetoric to advertise drawing schools, or to promote their own positions as architects, pattern drawers, or designers and modellers, or alternatively to promote academies of the arts. They fed another market for an extensive range of volumes of patterns and ornaments, as well as do-it-yourself drawing manuals addressed to the leisured gentry, youth, and practising artisans. These included guides to gentlemanly and charitable pursuits. There was The Arts Companion: or, A New Assistant for the Ingenious (1749), designed ‘for the instruction of gentlemen and ladies in the arts of drawing, japanning, painting upon glass . . . and of taking views according to the rules of perspective’. Another possibility was Mrs Dorothy Holt’s Address to the Ladies of Great Britain on Lace (1757), advertising the new invention of modern English point lace, but arguing that drawing ‘should be extended to some of our Foundling girls’, ‘for from that great resource of fancy, drawing, it is owing that French Trifles have long so wonderfully succeeded—our own common People not having, till lately, been furnished with the means even of expressing their own ideas’.⁴⁵ Ornament and drawing books ranged from Matthias Lock’s Principles of Ornament: or The Youth’s Guide to Drawing of Foliage (first edition n.d., 1740s) to A New Book of Ornaments for the Instruction of those Unacquainted with that Useful Part of Drawing. By Copland and Others (1758).⁴⁶ Print publishers ⁴³ Cited in Puetz, ‘Design Instruction’, 230. ⁴⁴ Dossie, The Handmaid of the Arts, i. p. viii. ⁴⁵ Arts Companion: or, A New Assistant for the Ingenious (London, 1749); Mrs Dorothy Holt, Addresss to the Ladies of Great Britain on Lace (London, 1757), 6–7, 18. ⁴⁶ A number of these manuals are listed by Puetz, ‘Design Instruction’, 220. Other manuals on drawing and perspective are listed by Craske, ‘Plan and Control’, 190.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight conflated art markets and amateur and artisanal markets for these volumes, seeking to reach wide audiences, and all of these volumes asserted the universal usefulness of drawing to invention and style.The message was still going strong at the end of the century. Drawing manuals such as Francis Fitzgerald’s five-volume The Artist’s Repository and Drawing Magazine, first published in 1788, but in its eighth edition by 1796, stressed the cultivation of our national taste for the arts by initiating and instructing young persons. The Society of Arts in 1778 withdrew most of its premiums on drawing in relation to manufacture. New developments prompted this response: the Royal Academy of Arts, established in 1768, promoted the ‘polite arts’; the earlier private initiatives and extensive publishing on arts and manufactures may have prompted it to seek other directions. There is a consensus among historians that there emerged a divide between the polite and commercial arts in the last third of the century, and further that professionals like architects, upholders, and designers sought to set themselves apart from the broader manufacturing and luxury trades.⁴⁷ Writing on the arts now stressed the economic utility of ornamental and decorative skills and technologies as a part of mechanical rather than liberal arts. The fine or polite arts were thus cut off from the commercial and industrial structures of the mechanical and useful arts. There is also a question over the part played by drawing skills. So much was written in the middle of the century on their importance to invention and manufacture, but there is little evidence of just what impact they actually had. Drawing manuals, technical and commercial encyclopedias full of drawings and engravings, as well as journals lavishly illustrated with ornate engravings, were clearly a mid- to later century literary genre with a market made in the more general world of contemporary print culture. It is possible that these works spread a ‘technical literacy’, a literacy based in graphical representation. Alternatively this literature might reflect ‘the apogee of the skilled, design-literate, English workforce’.⁴⁸ But ultimately, there is little direct connection to be made between technical change or product development and the existence of a rhetoric on the importance of drawing skills. Drawing schools and the widespread publication of cheap engravings and diagrams of machines, technical processes, and products provided no automatic source of ‘useful knowledge’, artisanal skill, or invention. Art, design, and innovation could just as readily be integrated into tacit knowledge through the interpersonal connections of artisans working across the luxury and consumer goods trades.Trade also encouraged art and ⁴⁷ Puetz, ‘Design Instruction’, 235.

⁴⁸ Craske, ‘Plan and Control., 210.

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Products of the Nation design as artisans responded to imports and to new objects, samples, and moulds. Seeing and analysing new things was one way to discover the qualities, designs, and techniques behind particular products. Postlethwayt urged the importance of handling and examining imported Asian commodities in order better to imitate and improve on them. Contemporaries recognized the part played by commerce and communication. John Barrow in his New and Universal Dictionary (1751) stressed the importance of commerce in spreading knowledge of consumer goods. By commerce ‘the mercantile people of all nations seem to be one body incorporated; and the riches of every trading town and place circulate into the hands of the poor industrious and distant traders. By this our necessities, conveniences, and pleasures are supplied from the most distant shores of the East and West Indies.’⁴⁹ While commerce spread knowledge of goods, print culture, it was argued, broke down the secrecy of the arts; print culture speeded communication of techniques.⁵⁰

Imitation and British Invention The encyclopedias and commercial dictionaries were other market leaders in the new print culture. Compilers of encyclopedias made many claims to the knowledge lying behind invention and novelty. The Wonders of Nature and Art (1750) offered knowledge from a number of authorities compiled according to country. Richard Rolt’s New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1756) provided information on ‘material, places and means of traffick’ to give a truer account of trade and commerce. Erasmus Middleton in his New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1778) stressed the need of artisans for a cheap, single-volume publication.⁵¹ And William Hall’s New Royal Encyclopaedia provided a compilation to stimulate ‘imitation’ and introduce novelty. As he argued, ‘the true art of imitation consists in so diversifying what we take from others as if we can, to improve it, or at least not suffer it to receive any detriment by our alteration’. The Encyclopaedia also introduced ‘novelty’: ‘a new object produces an emotion termed wonder . . . men tear themselves from their native country in search of things rare and new, and novelty converts in a pleasure’.⁵² Even in 1794 the Repertory of Arts and Manufactures set out its purpose to be the ‘means by which new discoveries and improvements in the useful arts and manufactures can be ⁴⁹ Barrow, New and Universal Dictionary, ‘Commerce’. ⁵⁰ Ibid. 1–2. ⁵¹ Richard Rolt, A New Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (London, 1756). ⁵² William Henry Hall, The New Royal Encyclopaedia (3 vols., London, 1788), 710.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight transmitted to the public’.This included summarizing findings from papers published by the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society on the ‘application of chemical principles’ to improve the art of dyeing.53 These editors and writers of dictionaries and encyclopedias advertised their success in communicating and diffusing existing knowledge. Invention must surely follow. Sometimes they chided each other on the limitations of what they offered. Dossie denounced earlier works, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, including Savary’s, for ‘taking passages out of old books instead of giving just accounts of the improved methods obtained from the ablest practitioners of the several arts’.⁵⁴ The encyclopedists claimed that invention derived not from individual genius, but from effectively imitating and recombining existing knowledge. The best encyclopedias offered the most up-to-date compendium of ‘useful knowledge’. The encyclopedists may have had a point. They spread a technical familiarity and competence, as well as a knowledge of existing problems and techniques in various parts of the world. This knowledge was, as Joel Mokyr now argues, an aspect of the ‘industrial enlightenment’. He, like these eighteenth-century forebears, argues that a substantial proportion of invention was based not in ‘genius’, but in ‘recombination’. Lower access costs to knowledge and existing practices elsewhere provided the inventor with information on which problems had been solved in the past. The belief that a problem was soluble stimulated the search for new techniques.⁵⁵ Invention founded in these principles of imitation was also central to product innovation focused on quality and variety. Premiums given by the Society of Arts and patents continually stressed the connections between imitation and new products. The Society offered a premium for artificial flowers to displace those imported from France and Italy, arguing that the flowers could be made ‘in other substances, obtainable in any quantity’, and that the art ‘might be easily acquired by inspection and imitation of the foreign’. ‘We pay to Italy and France, for various kinds of such flowers . . . a sum, that would appear almost incredible.’ Newly invented British artificial flowers would thus be a contribution to national wealth.The Society offered many premiums for varnishes to imitate the Chinese, Venetian, and French lacquers, eventually praising the ‘high perfection to which our workmen are now arrived in that art’. Another series of premiums was offered in 1757, 1763, and 1764 for paper as good as that of France. But Dossie reported in ⁵³ Repertory of Acts and Manufactures . . . from the Transactions of Philosophical Societies of All Nations, vol. i (London, 1794), 48–9. ⁵⁴ Dossie, The Handmaid of the Arts, p. xxvi. ⁵⁵ Mokyr, Gifts of Athena, 76.

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Products of the Nation 1768 that the premium ‘for making this paper equal in all qualities to the French has never been yet obtained’.⁵⁶ There were premiums in 1759 and 1760 for manufacturing paper from silk waste like ‘the Chinese’, and others in 1759 and 1762 for marbled paper, ‘equal to that practised in France’.⁵⁷ The society prided itself on the part played by its premiums for a native varnish to displace imports of Japanese and French lacquerware. The society’s premiums were followed by extensive patenting activity, with twenty patents for japanning processes and varnishes registered between 1757 and 1825. The society praised the ‘high perfection to which our workmen are now arrived in that art’, and japanning was soon more widely recognized as a British achievement, and Birmingham japanware as a national product more desirable than French lacquer.⁵⁸ The society was especially proud of its successful promotion of the carpet manufacture. It challenged artisans and projectors to imitate a classic luxury good, the Turkey carpet. Thomas Whitty won competitions run by the society for ‘making carpets in imitation of those brought from the East, and called Turkey carpets’, and on the basis of premiums and aristocratic patronage set up a carpet manufactory at Axminster in 1755. He argued that his new ‘imitative’ manufacture also created an English tapestry manufacture, replacing imports not just from Turkey, but also from France. His product, he claimed, answered the society’s proposal ‘to encourage making a sort which would be more generally useful and sell in the place of Turkey carpets’, and he used English material and workpeople trained by himself.⁵⁹ The society also claimed other successful textile imitations. ‘The making by the Loom, of Pieces of silk, cotton, linen, or woolen, in imitation of the Marseilles and India quilting, was brought from obscurity, next to oblivion, and nourished into a valuable manufacture by the Society’s encouragement’.⁶⁰ Quality, ornamentation, imitation, and new products were also the goals of many of Britain’s patentees. Patents, which are frequently referred to as evidence of inventiveness, were also very expensive in Britain, costing between £120 and £350 depending on geographical coverage. Many inventors decided the expense was not worth the protection offered, and the patents ⁵⁶ Robert Dossie, Memoirs of Agriculture and Other Oeconomical Arts (London, 1768), 92. ⁵⁷ Ibid., 107, 122. ⁵⁸ A. Rees, The Cyclopedia: or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature (London, 1802–20), ‘Japanning’. ⁵⁹ Society of Arts, Guard Book 3, vols. 5, 6, letter 78: Thomas Whitty, Axminster, to the Society, 21 Mar. 1757; Guard Book 4, no. 1, London, 29 Mar. 1758. ⁶⁰ Dossie, Memoirs, 230.

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight

Fig. 3.3. Patent Specification: John Joseph Merlin, ‘ “Dutch Oven” or machine for roasting meat, c.1773’. The patent specification listed all uses for the machine, and Merlin also used the patent specification in his advertising.TNA C210/13.The National Archives.

recorded, as a result, understate inventive activity. Their numbers certainly understated inventiveness in consumer goods techniques, materials, designs, and product types. But those patents which were taken out do show a high consumer orientation.They focused on new goods, on the ornament or finishing of a range of existing goods, and on extending the qualities and ~ 108 ~

Products of the Nation varieties within ranges of goods; general emphasis went to novelties and showy luxuries. One study of 166 textile improvements, patented and unpatented, found that 49.5 per cent of these aimed at product improvement or differentiation. Another study of 1,610 patents taken out for improvements connected to consumer goods in the period 1625–1825 found over 25 per cent of these specifying new products, ornamenting and finishing, and imitating.⁶¹ Imitation was patented; but inventors and designers also tried to protect themselves from other ‘imitators’ by attempting to patent or copyright every possible use or medium of their techniques. Forgeries, plagiarism, pirating, and counterfeiting of designs and moulds were rife in the Birmingham trades, in English porcelain works, in the London print trade and among the calico printers. In Britain printers, including calico printers looked to the copyright acts of 1735, 1767, and 1787, and engaged in another campaign on copyright and mechanical replication in the 1830s and 1840s. French engravers and printers challenged silk and wallpaper manufacturers under the Act of the Right of Genius of 1793. The campaigns for the acts and the litigation itself were all platforms for debate on privileges and property rights, invention, and the emulative basis of economic progress.62 New British products were patented as ‘imitations’ of precious luxuries, with examples from George Ravenscroft’s patent in 1674 for the ‘manufacture of crystalline glass resembling rock-crystal’, to Robert Redrich and Thomas Jones’s patent in 1724 for staining, spotting, veining, and clouding on earthenware to imitate marble, porphyry and other stones, and tortoiseshell. Wedgwood in 1769 patented his ornament on earthenware to imitate encaustic painting, and Henry Clay, the Birmingham japanner, patented objects made in new materials such as his japanned buttons.⁶³ British earthenware was one of the great success stories of this widespread endeavour to imitate, and in so doing to invent new British goods. British earthenware and porcelain manufacturers took out patent after patent with the stated goal of imitating Dutch delftware or Chinese ⁶¹ On textiles see T. Griffiths, P. Hunt, and P. O’Brien, ‘Inventive Activity in the British Textile Industry, 1700–1800’, Journal of Economic History, 52 (1992), 880–906. On consumer goods patents see M. Berg, ‘From Imitation to Invention: Creating Commodities in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Economic History Review, 45 (2002), 1–30. ⁶² Young, English Porcelain, 88; Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention’, 245–8; Lara Kriegel, ‘Culture and the Copy: Calico, Capitalism and Design Copyright in Early Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 43 (Apr. 2004), 233–65; Katie Scott, ‘Art and Industry—A Contradictory Union: Authors, Rights and Copyrights during the Consulat’, Journal of Design History, 13 (2000) 1–21. ⁶³ Benet Woodcraft, Subject-Matter Index of Patents of Invention (London, 1857), nos. 297, 386, 461, 939, 1055, 1299; id., Titles of Patents of Invention (London, 1854), nos. 1729 (1790) and 1148 (1777).

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Luxury, Quality, and Delight porcelain. They copied, plagiarized, and designed, creating new goods to meet the taste for elegance at affordable prices demanded by middling-class and gentry consumers. In the process they created the British creamware, the Worcester and Derby porcelain, and the Staffordshire ware that became so distinctive as to be branded in international markets, and to be sought out in world markets as the quality consumer ware that ‘British’ goods had come to be. ‘Invented’ goods, aesthetically pleasing, convenient, ingenious, available in many designs and qualities, came by the end of the eighteenth century to be ‘British’ goods. They seized world markets; a French anglomanie prevailed for this English, modern luxury.Tea wares and tea tables, japanned and enamelled ware, all sorts of plated ware and metal ornament, then earthenware, as well as the ubiquitous buckles and buttons, were imported, smuggled, and desired. These were imitations of things that had gone before, to be sure, but they were, in their very inventing, new products. The emulative, imitative context of eighteenth-century invention spanned both product and process innovation. New mechanical techniques, rolling, stamping, moulding, and interchangeable parts, were applied to a range of complementary and substitute products, in turn developing these in new directions. Chemical innovations, especially in dyeing, metal mixtures, and coal-using processes, were applied to the making of substitute materials, which in turn entailed new products. The imitation extolled by Adam Smith as a ‘source of wonder’ alongside the aesthetic principle of beauty and the desire for goods became the key to the invention of modern British consumer goods.

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Part II








How it was Made 

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Britain’s new consumer goods were developed as semi-luxuries to meet the diverse demands of middling-class markets; they were endlessly variable, individualized and customized, fashionable and affordable. They also became major export commodities, conveying good-quality fine ware branded as British to the rest of the world. Just how this was achieved was first and foremost a triumph of invention and production. It was also a success story of distribution and retailing. These were goods created in innovative centres, and produced in areas that developed regional specializations in labour and knowledge. They were made for broad middling-class markets, quality domestic ware that might be wanted by men, women, and families in a social range from small tradespeople to the polite elites, and were desirable in all parts of the country. This domestic ware was made for newly civilized living spaces, with furnishings, floor coverings, lighting and mirrors, with glass and ceramic eating and drinking utensils, fine cutlery, candlesticks, and metal ornament of all kinds. The glass and chinaware and silver plated, steel, brass, and japanned ornamental ware were perhaps the most widely consumed and identifiably British new consumer goods. Newly invented, deploying new technologies, they were made in key industrial regions that grew rapidly over the period. The story of how these goods were made and sold will be told in depth in the two chapters following. These new commodities were bought, used, and displayed within the framework of large numbers of other domestic goods. Many of these also made a new appearance during the course of the late seventeenth century or the early to mid-eighteenth century. Upholstery, especially curtains, bed hangings, and quilts, was popular from the late seventeenth century. For those who could afford them, there were printed chintzes imported from India. But from the 1720s, after prohibitions on importing these fabrics, English linen and later cotton manufacturers produced many prints suited to furnishings: by 1750 there were eight different types of furniture checks available from Lancashire mills. Window curtains, by this time, were a suitable decency of middling-class housing. Where earlier there had been little decoration of rooms among all social groups except the elite, from the early eighteenth century more furniture was bought, some of it upholstered, some of it made of newly imported ~ 113 ~

How it was Made woods from the Americas. Tradesmen who often lived in rented accommodation, or if they owned it would rent out their best rooms to others, focused their possessions on the parlour and their sleeping chambers.The fixed decoration most commonly installed was new style fireplaces with heatefficient grates, mantels, and fire furnishings. But in times of prosperity over the course of their life cycles, artisans and tradesmen bought individual items of furniture, from tables to bookcases, chests of drawers to chairs and tea tables. For those with greater wealth, large furniture workshops offered a whole array of furniture deemed necessary to polite living. Those workshops also put out manufacture to a network of carvers, chairmakers, gilders, and marquetry and upholstery workers in London and in provincial centres such as Lancaster. Here the new lighter-weight mahogany and walnut furnishings were made to suit the tastes and pocket books of a range of customers. By the later eighteenth century mahogany worth nearly £80,000 and weighing 7,000 tons was imported from the West Indies.¹ Well-known furniture firms such as Gillows in Lancaster sold fine, but restrained, furnishings not just to the provincial gentry elites but to merchants and industrialists, and also to tradesmen, from booksellers, grocers, and ironmongers to chandlers, masons, and printers. While the great London furniture makers—Thomas Chippendale, John Channon, Mayhew & Ince, and others, as well as the upholsterers such as John Linnell—produced bespoke items for aristocrats and wealthy urban elites, they also conveyed patterns and designs for a wider consuming public through popular design manuals such as Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director or George Hepplewhite’s The Cabinet-maker and Upholsterer’s Guide. Large numbers of smaller cabinetmakers, furniture makers, and upholsterers, in many provincial towns as well as in London, drew on the designs to provide for a wide range of customers from rural gentry to shopkeepers and small tradesmen. Some of these also took on the role of interior decorators; upholsterers and upholders not only provided the furniture, but arranged coordinating curtains and floor coverings, wall decoration, and lighting fixtures. They were by no means employed only by the elites, but also by numerous small shopkeepers, keen to develop fashionable retail interiors in their shops. Fashionable furniture was set off by lighting and mirrors, which were among the most rapidly diffused of luxury goods. Candlelight and oil lamps illuminated public spectacle from theatres and opera houses to coffee hous¹ Edward T. Joy, ‘Some Aspects of the London Furniture Industry in the Eighteenth Century’, University of London MA thesis (1955), 9.

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How it was Made es and assemblies, and were a major budget expense of even middling-class families. Extensive innovation in domestic oil lamps reached a fashionable pinnacle in the Argand Lamp, its French inventor bought out by Matthew Boulton. Candles and lamps went with mirrors. Where in 1675 fewer than 10 per cent of sampled English households outside London and the Home Counties had looking glasses among their possessions, by 1725 mirrors were as common as beds, chairs, and tables.² Looking glasses which complemented larger windows and set off smaller ornamented fireplaces were a sign of respectability in rooms for receiving visitors. The point of many of these new commodities, at least during the first half to three-quarters of the eighteenth century, was not to make domestic life easier or more comfortable, but to display genteel taste. Fashion, elegance, gentility, ‘a good effect’, ‘magnificence and proportion’ and ‘a splendid appearance’ were their selling points. But in the latter half of the century furnishings scaled to smaller spaces, to intimacy and ease of social interaction, complemented the production of other new goods made in a range of qualities and prices, fashionable to the wealthy while accessible to the middling classes. Wallpaper, while initially expensive, spread rapidly with the engraving and print trades; it was fashionable by the 1740s, and displaced the much more costly moulded and modelled plasterwork. Floors were carpeted from the 1760s with English Axminster and Kidderminster carpets for the wealthy, and with the cheaper ‘Kitterminster’ stuff, an imitation for those who wanted something of the same effect. But by the end of the eighteenth century there were a thousand carpet looms in Kidderminster, and these English carpets had become yet another successful new consumer good.³ While all of these new commodities have their separate curatorial histories, many of these histories are still narratives centred on individual goods made primarily for aristocratic consumers. The industrial histories of the commodities made not just for the elites, but for a rapidly expanding urban middling class, both at home and abroad, have not been written, nor have they been part of the wider history of the industrial revolution. Even the most obvious product, so long seen to be central to industrialization— cotton textiles—was written about until recently as a concept, not as a real product. While recent writing on cotton clothing has to some extent redressed this oversight, there is much to be done on the interaction of cotton ² Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London, 1988), 63, 169, 189. ³ R. Dossie, Memoirs of Agriculture and other Oeconomical Arts (London, 1768), 89, 230.

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How it was Made manufacturers, merchants, upholsterers, drapers, and consumers. There is no prospect here of offering a comprehensive account of the invention, production, and distribution of all these consumer products. We still long to know ‘how it was made’. We can make a start, however, in turning to what became international brands by the end of the eighteenth century: English glass, Staffordshire china, Birmingham buckles, brassware and japanning, and Sheffield plate and cutlery.

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4


Glass and Chinaware: The Grammar of the Polite Table Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock

The most celebrated imitative commodities of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were glass, ceramics, and printed textiles. As we have seen, many European countries developed their own imitations of Asian printed calicoes and porcelain, though Britain later scooped the insatiable markets for colourful printed calicoes by pursuing the high-speed development of a native cotton industry. But it was British glass, especially flint glass and British earthenware, which introduced a whole new British style of modern consumer goods to middling- and upper-class markets at home as well as in Europe and the colonies.

Glass Both glass and ceramics held special qualities as luxury goods, and both were ideal candidates for the market opportunities and innovation created by shifting social structures in Britain from the later seventeenth century. The fine glassware of Renaissance Venice was created in the context of a social distribution of wealth through commercial as well as landed society. Urban life, civility, and refinement redirected spending habits towards the virtuous display of finely crafted luxury items used in a context conveying knowledge, taste, and hospitality. Glass, made from sand and ash, became, like fine ceramics, a luxury good, based not on the value and rarity of its raw materials, but on its craftsmanship and its potential for imitating nature. Glass and ~ 117 ~

How it was Made maiolica both fulfilled the central tenet of Renaissance aesthetics in their ability to evoke or imitate the physical world. Maiolica, the fine white tin-glazed earthenware, decorated in elaborate hand-painted designs, graced elite tables of Italy’s city states from the fifteenth century. The glass which imitated crystal was not so different from the porcelain, and, in turn, maiolica which reproduced images of silver.¹ Renaissance writers were fascinated by the ability of glass to imitate other more precious materials, and by its capacity for being worked into forms and shapes not possible with other media.They admired its innate beauty. Above all, they praised the skill of specialist glassworkers in achieving harmonies of form and visual effect.² Venetian glass met demands arising out of new noble and mercantile desires to display private splendour in refined hospitality at table. It was delicate and fragile: its thinness and ephemeral nature represented the ‘vanitas’ and the transitory in the material world. It fulfilled the ideals of the Renaissance arts in its emphasis on elegance of form and proportion and the goal of harmony. Glassware displayed complex skills of assembly, and the ability of skilled artisanship to produce a quality material. The prices of fine Venetian glass and painted maiolica were similar, and both were within reach of the growing ranks of Renaissance society’s urban commercial classes. They were accessible to two distinctive markets with similar aspirations—the commercial classes who wished to add a sense of refinement to their lives, and the upper classes who purchased glass to demonstrate good taste and interest in fine craftsmanship. Venetian glass was also an international luxury, traded throughout Europe, and even reaching to the New World and Asia.³ The use of glass for tableware in royal and aristocratic households even in Britain was described by William Harrison in his Description of England in 1586. It is a world to see in these our days, wherein gold and silver most aboundeth, how that our gentility, as loathing those metals [because of the plenty] do now generally choose rather the Venice glasses, both for our wine and beer . . . and such is the estimation of this stuff that many become rich only with their new trade unto Murano . . . from whence the very best are daily to be had. And as this is seen in the gentility, so in the wealthy communality the like desire of glass is not neglected.⁴ ¹ Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, 1986, 1999), 223–34; Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 249. ² Patrick McCray, The Fragile Craft: A History of Venetian Glass (Aldershot, 1999), 114. ³ Ibid., 131–41, 234–5. ⁴ Cited in R. D. Charleston, English Glass and the Glass Used in England, circa 1400–1940 (London, 1984), 50.

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Glass and Chinaware By 1626, over 10,000 crystal glasses were imported from Venice into England each year, and Venetian glassworkers would make anything on demand.⁵ It was not long before the rest of Europe sought not only the glories of Venetian glass, but the means to produce it in their own countries. The secrets of the fluxes and furnace techniques and the artistry and craftsmanship were sought through attracting Venetian glassmen into France, the Netherlands, and England. Venetian glassworkers had established a glasshouse in Antwerp, and were said to have reached England by 1549. A Venetian, Verzelini, had acquired a London glasshouse and an English patent by 1574, and by the early seventeenth century English workers were acquiring their skills. Venetian expertise in making quality flat or plate glass including mirrors was likewise transferred to France under Colbert, and became the basis for the celebrated Saint-Gobain glassworks set up in Picardy in 1688.⁶

The Invention of Flint Glass: A New Product for a New Market The transfer of the Venetian craft into northern Europe extended the manufacture and brought prices down, but such production was still very limited. It was not this that sparked the really significant shift in markets for, and uses of, glass in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather it was an act of imitation—the British invention of flint glass. It was this, rather than the transfer of Venetian glass techniques, which made glass a modern luxury. British flint glass production did, however, take off both from the Venetian heritage, and from the broader context of British coalfired glass production. Flint glass was the invention of George Ravenscroft, who with his brothers was engaged in the Venetian trade. This was heavy, white, clear, and lustrous glass which was capable of being cut. Ravenscroft’s glasshouse, the Savoy furnace in London, was run by Venetian craftsmen. Into this context he introduced a new technique of substituting calcined flint derived from Italian marble river pebbles for sand, and refined Spanish potash for soda. In addition he added large amounts of lead oxide to the batch, producing a completely new kind of glass. Added to this Venetian imitative context was the peculiarly British context of the broader glass industry. Unlike Venetian and other continental ⁵ Robin Hildyard, ‘British Supremacy’, in Reino Liefkes, Glass (London, 1997), 82–103, p. 84. ⁶ Eleanor Godfrey, The Development of English Glassmaking 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1975), 252; Charleston, English Glass, 53–64; Harris, Industrial Espionage, 342–3.

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How it was Made glass, the new flint glass as well as all other glass was produced in coal-fired furnaces. A British patent for glass in 1615 also included a ban on the use of wood for glassmaking. British glass technologies thus developed in tandem with coal-fired furnace technologies. If techniques of making high-quality drinking glasses could be developed against this constraint, then they also opened opportunities for high output and low prices. The British glass industry was said by Mansell in the mid-seventeenth century to support 4,000 workers, most of these families working in the bottle and window glass manufacture. Bottlemaking during the Restoration became one of the largest branches of glassmaking; this too was a British product tied to the peculiarities of the coal-furnace process. Glassmakers in the midseventeenth century discovered that open-topped pots in coal-fired glass furnaces produced an almost black (very dark green) solid glass which successfully excluded light, and was ideal for storing and transporting wine. By 1696 there were forty-two bottle houses in England, in London, Stourbridge, Bristol, and Newcastle. Water from Bristol and Bath, and beers and cider of the West Country, were bottled around Bristol, and traded on a large scale to the American colonies. The process had spread to France by the early eighteenth century, and storing wine in glass bottles rather than flagons, and bottling wine spread throughout households. The Dutch and the Venetians adopted the process, and in Venice the bottle houses were known as ‘bottiglie d’Inghilterra’.⁷ A survey of glassmaking in 1696 showed 88 glasshouses at work in England and Wales: 37 of these were bottle houses, 22 flint and ordinary table glass manufacturers, 19 were flat glass manufacturers, 2 produced crown glass and plate, and the rest produced both bottle and flat glass. The industry was concentrated in London, Bristol, Stourbridge, and Tyneside. The industry from these seventeenth-century initiatives emphasized practicality and a relatively broadly-based market for distinctive good-quality glassware. While flint glass provided a new British luxury, the glass industry in which it was set also supplied windows for medium-sized houses, standardized bottles, and thousands of ordinary drinking glasses supplied to the middling classes and to taverns spread throughout the British regions. This remained the key principle of British glass, even in all the varieties of table and cut glass offered by flint glass throughout the eighteenth century. Samuel Johnson witnessed in the glassworks he visited not rarity, but convenience. In the ‘shapeless mass of molten glass “rugged with ⁷ Hildyard, ‘British Supremacy’, 86–7; Harris, Industrial Espionage, 326; Ada Polak, Glass: Its Makers and its Public (London, 1975), 152–3.

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Glass and Chinaware excrescences and clouded with impurities” . . . lay concealed so many conveniences of the world.’⁸

Eighteenth-Century Glass Flint glass production came into its own in a new market for a whole range of domestic wares only in the 1730s. The Glass Sellers’ Company, formed in 1664, dictated fashion and exercised control over flint glass production and glass imports until the expiry of George Ravenscroft’s patent in 1684. The company had previously dictated the forms in which the new metal might be shaped.⁹ Now glass men concentrated on newer, lighter forms and practical designs that were to bring about English domination of world glass markets during the eighteenth century. London was the major centre with its main glasshouses: Whitefriars, the Falcon and Falcon Stairs Glasshouses, the Minories Glasshouse, and the glasshouse at Salt Petre Bank. Stourbridge ranked next to London in flint glass production by the eighteenth century. Bristol extended its capacity from bottle and crown window glass to flint glass in these years, and by 1797 had fourteen glasshouses. Newcastle, known for its window glass, nevertheless had two celebrated flint glasshouses. By 1783 the annual profit of the English glass trade was £630,000, and in 1835 there were 106 glasshouses in the country, ten in Scotland, and another ten in Ireland. Traditions established in the seventeenth century continued to characterize the market and the industry in the early nineteenth century. Most of the glassmakers worked on a regular commission basis; the bulk of output was in practical ordinary merchandise, and even the aristocracy bought the simple, standardized motifs that were regularly available. The industry moved on from the relatively small concerns of the seventeenth century, employing on average 15–20 glassworkers who were paid the very high wages for the time of £60–80 a year.¹⁰ The number of glasshouses declined from their highpoint of twenty-four in London in 1696 to three in 1833. But these were now huge concerns. In 1774, Vigne, Neave, Winscote, and Walker insured their manufactory in Southwark for £900, their stock of glass for £200, and other stock and utensils for £3,500. By 1821, the glassworks owned by Reed and Wainwright was one of the largest manufacturing firms in London, with its ⁸ Polak, Glass, 139; Godfrey, Development, 256. ⁹ G. Bernard Hughes, English, Scottish and Irish Table Glass from the Sixteenth Century to 1820 (London, 1956), 56. ¹⁰ Francis Buckley, A History of Old English Glass (London, 1925), 3–7; Polak, Glass, 139–41; Godfrey, Development, 256.

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How it was Made warehouses and glasshouse in Upper East Smithfield alone insured for £7,290.¹¹ The industry by the 1770s contained the whole range of industrial structures, from the huge British Cast Plate Glass Company at Ravenhead with its great working halls, casting hall, porticoed manager’s house and stable buildings, to the works with only a few people in the Birmingham small glass trade. A prospectus for a more modest plate glass house in London envisaged an establishment of fifty workers paid at 15s. per week. The provincial flint glass houses were generally smaller, and wages considerably lower. The Hickin Glass Business in Bilston, Staffordshire, manufacturing bottle and window glass, employed only twenty-nine workers on a regular basis. Only one of these was paid 14s. a week, six were lads paid 3–4s. a week, and the rest were paid 7–9s. a week.¹²

Markets and Prices London was the marketing centre for drinking glasses and bottles. Even the provincial glasshouses from Newcastle to Bristol generally sold their goods via London. Newcastle had long traditions of sending window glass to London in coal ships. But even for drinking glasses, London was the marketing centre. The aristocracy, gentry, and middle classes of the north-east ordered most of their glass from London. Agents and warehousemen from London supplied fine tableware. The Newcastle manufacturers certainly made some of these good-quality drinking glasses by the later eighteenth century, but, along with their bottles and window glass, they dispatched these to London. Even Scotland was served with bottles, drinking glasses, and all other sorts of glass from London in the first half of the century. Bristol sent its bottles to London, but exported its smart table glass to America. London had the glass cutters and finishers, though Bristol specialized in enamelling, and Birmingham connected its small glass trade to its complementary toy trade. Though provincial manufacturers produced the new glass, London merchants distributed it. For London had long experience in the wholesale and retail of luxury goods. The infrastructure created by the Glass Sellers’ ¹¹ David Barnett, London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution: A Revisionary History 1775–1825 (London, 1998), 104. ¹² J. R. Harris, ‘Saint-Gobain and Ravenhead’, in J. R. Harris, Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France (Aldershot, 1992), 34–77, pp. 36, 45; Francis Buckley, ‘The Birmingham Glass Trade 1740–1833’, Transactions of the Society of Glass Technology, 11 (1927), 374–86; MSS Papers of Hicken Glass Business, Bilston, Staffs., Stafford Record Office D1798/647.

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Glass and Chinaware Company, dating back to 1664, included warehouses and transport routes. Glass was also advertised in newspapers and sold direct, initially from showrooms in front of the glassworks or from a factory-owned shop, but increasingly after 1740 in independent glass shops. The metropolitan glass sellers were substantial tradesmen in the first half of the eighteenth century, charging £20 for apprenticeships, and spending £200–500 stocking their shops. Getting the glass to London and out again to provincial retailers and customers was a complicated and risky business. Packmen transported the glass about the country in panniers strapped to the flanks of packhorses moving in single file, and in the charge of an armed guard. Breakages were high, and customers were advised to order a 25 per cent excess. Glass stalls were ubiquitous at fairs, and pedlars and chapmen back to the seventeenth century contravened the Glass Sellers’ monopoly, and hawked glasses about the countryside.¹³ International markets were just as important to producers as were domestic markets. The French took 23,000 pieces of glass in the first six months of 1714. By 1780 Britain supplied flint glass to Ireland, India, and the British colonies. In the first six months of 1801, 75 cargoes of Bristol glass were dispatched from Bristol for Canada, America, Ireland, and the West Indies, and New York alone received 140 crates of Bristol flint glass and other boxes and cases of glass.¹⁴ This glass was subject to an excise tax from 1745 at 9s. 4d. per hundredweight on the raw materials used in flint glass and white glass. Theories abound over the impact of the tax on the weight, size, and shape of pieces subsequently made. Perhaps the tax encouraged glassmen to take advantage of the improved manipulation allowed by flint glass to produce more pieces from each batch and to deploy more ornament. But in fact the duty was not onerous; undecorated flint glass which sold at 9d. a pound in 1746 rose to 10d. a pound in 1752.The duties were repealed in 1777, and a tax of 2d. a pound on materials imposed instead; this tax had reached 101/2d. a pound by 1820, and three excisemen were assigned to each glasshouse to ensure collection.¹⁵ Retailers perceived drinking glasses to be luxury ware, though the bulk of these sold at modest prices. Specialist shops sold the best ware; the shops ¹³ George Unwin, The Guilds and Companies of London (London, 1908), 378; Catherine Ross, ‘The Flint Glass Houses on the Rivers Tyne and Wear during the Eighteenth Century’, Glass Circle, 5 (1986), 75–85, p. 84; Hildyard, ‘British Supremacy’, 101; Buckley, Old English Glass, 3; Hughes, English, Scottish and Irish Table Glass, 49, 64; Sheenah Smith, ‘Glass in Eighteenth-Century Norwich’, Glass Circle, 2 (1975), 49–65, pp. 52–7. ¹⁴ Buckley, Old English Glass, 3–5. ¹⁵ See ibid. 41, for connections between the scale of taxes and the shape and height of glasses. For a similar argument see Charleston, English Glass, 142; Hughes, English, Scottish and Irish Table Glass, 64.

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How it was Made later included English porcelain in their range of goods. ‘Chinamen’ (china dealers), toymen, and even buttonmakers sold glassware.¹⁶ Drinking glasses were sold in a whole range of types from simple beer and cider glasses to English stemmed wine glasses and flowered water glasses, from cheap dram and gin glasses to jelly and sweetmeat glasses, decanters, salvers, and punch bowls. The slow-cooling properties of lead glass dictated its forms. This glass did not lend itself to imitations of fine Venetian glass with its pulled ribbons and threads of glass. Designers instead made a virtue of an English style for strong simple forms. Glassmakers enhanced these with stamped ‘prunts’, heavy pincered ribbons, chain trailing, and mould-blown ribbing pulled together with pincers in a molten state. This glass had an added advantage; it could be cut in imitation of German cut glass. And a new luxury industry emerged during the 1720s in cut glass production—first of expensive dessert dishes and glasses, and later of chandelier glass. John Akerman of the Royal Exchange, Cornhill, advertised cut flint glass from 1719, and by the mid-eighteenth century London glassmakers and cutters supplied chandelier glass to England and many parts of Europe. Cut glass, used where candlelight or sunlight would release the light from its cut facet, was a new British achievement, difficult for other Europeans to imitate.The light-refractive qualities of flint glass made it ideal for candlelight. But candles were expensive, at 1d. apiece in 1739, and many lived in poorly lit rooms except on special occasions. Large numbers of candles and glass chandeliers could make a dazzling spectacle over the customary gloom. When Lady Cowper held an assembly in her great room the lighting alone required five dozen wax candles at a cost of 5s. Cut glass conveyed luxury refinement; it was a London not a provincial product. These new cut glass products were made not in the glasshouse, but in glass-selling and glass-cutting establishments, mainly in London. The famous glass cutters were John Akerman (1719–85), Jerome Johnson (1739–61), Thomas Betts then Jonathan Collett (1738–1800), Maydwell & Windle in the Strand (1751–78), and Parker’s on Fleet Street (1762–1818). Elite customers during the latter half of the century sought out glass services; glasses were made in different shapes and sizes for table settings on the continent well before the 1780s; the practice spread in England of using matched sets designed to complement porcelain table services. In wealthier settings such services were further extended into dessert services, where glass dishes were set in this decorative course, intended to delight ¹⁶ Smith, ‘Glass in Eighteenth-Century Norwich’, 50–7.

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Glass and Chinaware

Fig. 4.1. A baluster cordial or toastmaster’s glass, c.1730. Sotheby’s Picture Library.

the eye alongside all manner of confectioner’s sculptures and porcelain figures.¹⁷ Drinking glass could be had for a whole range of prices. With the spread of flint glass production, prices fell sharply during the early eighteenth century, and basic prices ranged between 6d. and 9d. a pound. Decoration, such as flowering, could add 75 per cent to these prices. These prices translated at the local level, for example at Sturbich Fair in Norfolk in 1757, into tall wine glasses and beakers sold at 2s. 3d. to 2s. 6d. per dozen.¹⁸ Higher-quality ware sold at 5s. to 6s. per dozen, close to a week’s wages at the time for ¹⁷ Charleston, English Glass, 141, 168–71, 174–9; Hildyard, ‘British Supremacy’, 97–8; Polak, Glass, 143–8. ¹⁸ Peter Brown and Marla Schwartz, Come Drink the Bowl Dry (York, 1996), 71; Smith, ‘Glass in Eighteenth-Century Norwich’, 53.

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How it was Made Table 4.1. Prices of Glasses

1 doz. wine glasses 1 doz. jelly glasses 1 doz. beer glasses 1 doz. wine glasses cut & engraved

1715

1725

1734

1745/7

1765

1781

6s. — 12s. —

— 1s. 9d. — —

— 2s. 6s. —

5s. 6d. 5s. — —

6s. — 6s. —

— — — 18s.

Sources: 1715, 1725, 1734, 1745/7—Prices based on variety of purchasers cited in Francis Buckley, A History of Old English Glass (London, 1954), 146–7. Prices of cut and engraved wine glasses in 1781 from R. J. Charleston, English Glass and the Glass Used in England c.400–1940 (London, 1984). 1765—Prices paid for glasses by Lord Fairfax. Fairfax Papers, Northallerton Record Office, cited in Peter Brown and Marla Schwartz, Come Drink the Bowl Dry (York, 1966), 98, 101. Price of wine cited in Aris’s Birmingham Gazette 1766 was £2 6s. per dozen. Buckley, A History of Old English Glass, 150.

glassworkers and potters. Basic glassware was good value: a dozen glasses bought at the fairs cost a little less than a comparable set of common Staffordshire creamware, and both were cheaper than most cutlery; similar money would only buy half a dozen iron spoons. A better set of wine or beer glasses cost a good deal less than a pair of brass candlesticks.¹⁹

Earthenware and Porcelain British earthenware was a later, more celebrated achievement. It followed the salutary path from imitation to invention marked out by glassware.This was not an obvious route for an industry so closely connected to luxury porcelain.The great popularity of imported oriental porcelain, brought into Britain by the ton and sold through East India Company auctions by the early eighteenth century, stimulated a Europe-wide search for the secret of porcelain. European courts spent fortunes seeking the prize; Dresden took it when Böttger, in 1709, working under Augustus the Strong, produced the first European porcelain. The secret was heavily guarded, and production at the royal factory at Albrechtsburg Castle in Meissen was confined to the highest forms of luxury ware suited to a king and his court.²⁰ ¹⁹ For prices of common creamware see Neil McKendrick, ‘Josiah Wedgwood and the Commercialization of the Potteries’, in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (London, 1982), 100–45, p. 137; for prices of cutlery and brass candlesticks see Table 5.3, below. ²⁰ For a popular account of the race to discover porcelain see Janet Gleeson, The Arcanum (London, 1998).

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Glass and Chinaware

Fig. 4.2. A Bacchanalian Piece. Sir Thomas Samwell and his Friends, c.1733. Philippe Mercier. French, 1689–1760. Oil on canvas 239.4 ¥ 148.5 cm. The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, New Brunswick.

This high-luxury production was repeated in other German principalities such as Frederick the Great’s Berlin factory. Prince Albrecht Ernst of Öttingen-Öttingen placed his porcelain factory in his menagerie garden. This pattern continued in other European royal factories, in the production of both soft-paste porcelains and later hard-paste porcelains.The manufacture was fostered, and heavily protected, by the French monarchy: first at Saint-Cloud as early as 1693, then later at Chantilly, Mennecy, and Vincennes, and finally at Sèvres. Capo di Monte was an ornament of the court of Charles III, the Bourbon king of Naples and Spain.²¹ All of these porcelain works produced prized luxury tableware and modelled figures, not for a market, but for a king and his court. They imitated the technology of oriental porcelains, but not Asian industrial structures and marketing acumen. Out of the acquisition of the recipe for Chinese porcelain, these works created a rarefied art object. They did not, therefore, displace the market for oriental porcelain, based mainly as this was in standardized wares for a broad middle-rank market. British manufacturers and retailers recognized the potential market then served by imported oriental porcelains. This was the same market which ²¹ Bevis Hillier, Pottery and Porcelain 1700–1914 (London, 1968), 36.

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How it was Made underpinned the invention and development of lead crystal or flint glass, the British invention based in an imitation of luxury Venetian glass.The search, then, was on in Britain for a similarly successful imitation and development of porcelain.Two paths opened: founding a distinctive native British porcelain manufacture, or improving and adapting existing British earthenware. Both were market driven, outside royal prerogatives, patronage, and protection. British porcelain attained some minor success in this context, but the real achievement in imitating Chinese standardized production and market strategies belonged to the earthenware sector. The three great technical achievements of British ceramics—bone china, the creamware body, and transfer printing—crossed these paths, and produced another ‘modern luxury’, aesthetically distinctive, cost-effective, and projected at rapidly expanding middling-class markets. The British porcelain works were late developers on the European scene. The bone china recipe, an original contribution to a new type of porcelain, was patented in 1749, and went into production at the Bow factory. Additional porcelain works were established at Chelsea, then at Derby, Lowestoft, Plymouth, and Worcester. Others, Longton Hall and New Hall, were established in the 1780s and 1790s in the Staffordshire potteries. Most of the English output was a direct imitation of oriental porcelain, and included inexpensive wares for daily use. It was decorated in cobalt blue, painted or printed in underglaze blue. And it was sold through the extensive pre-existing glass and chinaware wholesale and retail networks selling to both middle-rank and aristocratic consumers. The industry provided basic everyday ware as well as fine tableware to both groups.²² Porcelain in Britain was not the preserve of royal and aristocratic patrons, but it was, nevertheless, firmly ensconced within the luxury trades; it also expanded quickly against the backdrop of high tariff walls. These two factors distinguished it from earthenware manufacture, and acted as constraints on a flexible response to industrial and market opportunities. The early British porcelain works were widely dispersed, and the industry attracted as entrepreneurs those who had worked in other sectors of the luxury trades, as well as gentleman scientists and artists with little business experience. Thomas Frye, who patented bone china, was an artist and mezzotint engraver. Nicholas Sprimont and James Cox, who had each owned the Chelsea Works in turn, were a silversmith and a goldsmith respectively. Nicholas Crisp, who owned the Vauxhall works, was a gentleman and founder of the Society of Arts; he was involved in all manner of its projects and schemes. ²² Young, English Porcelain, 18.

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Glass and Chinaware Dr John Wall of the Worcester factory was a physician and inventor. Worcester and Bow were very large-scale works. Bow in 1760 employed 300 under one roof in a purpose-built factory insured for £1,675; Worcester employed 200 in 1764 in buildings insured for £1,000.²³ Earthenware production by contrast was concentrated in north Staffordshire, its entrepreneurs drawn from the local yeoman community. Staffordshire potters, tightly bound together with their own dialect and chapel, even filled outposts of the industry such as the Herculaneum Pottery established in Liverpool in 1796. Family and close working connections bound together the core group involved in industrializing the potteries—the Elers brothers at Bradwell Wood, John Astbury and Enoch Booth, Thomas and John Wedgwood of Burslem, and Thomas Whieldon and his former craftsmen and apprentices, Josiah Wedgwood, Aaron Wood, William Greatbatch, and Josiah Spode.²⁴ The pot banks or pottery works were very small in comparison with contemporary porcelain works. Whieldon’s pottery employed sixteen in 1750, and Baddeley’s pottery at Shelton, forty. The London potteries, mainly stoneware and delftware works, were much larger in scale, but they shrank in the middle of the century and then closed down. By contrast, the midlands potteries grew much larger in the latter half of the eighteenth century, some of them employing 300–400, and surpassing the model porcelain works. But even within Staffordshire, where there were over 100 potteries by the 1770s, none of these controlled the market. Wedgwood’s Etruria, built in 1766, was set within a successful potting region, closely networked and already providing for wide international markets.²⁵ Wedgwood wrote of the region in 1762,‘In Burslem there are 500 separate potteries for stoneware and earthenware.They provide employment for 7,000 and exports to Liverpool, Bristol, Hull and from there to America and the West Indian colonies and every port in Europe.’²⁶ The middle ranks, and not just the aristocracy, as in Europe, were expected to buy some porcelain. Pricing and decorating policies were thus geared ²³ Hillier, Pottery and Porcelain, 38; Young, English Porcelain, 22, 33, and 43. ²⁴ Lorna Weatherill, The Pottery Trade and North Staffordshire 1660–1760 (Manchester, 1971), 142; E. Myra Brown and Terence A. Lockett (eds.), Made in Liverpool: Liverpool Pottery and Porcelain 1700–1850 (National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside) (Liverpool, 1993), 44; Robin Reilly, Wedgwood, 2 vols. (London, 1989), i. 25. ²⁵ Weatherill, The Pottery Trade, 49–52; L. Weatherill, ‘The Growth of the Pottery Industry in England, 1660–1815’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 17 (1983), 15–46, p. 22; George L. Miller, Ann Smart Martin, and Nancy S. Dickinson, ‘Changing Consumption Patterns: English Ceramics and the American Market from 1770 to 1840’, in Catherine E. Hutchins (ed.), Everyday Life in the Early Republic (Winterthur, Del., 1994), 219–48, p. 225. ²⁶ Finer and Savage, Selected Letters, 154–6; Weatherill, ‘The Growth of the Pottery Industry’, 25–8.

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How it was Made to these middling markets. Though the porcelain works employed large numbers of decorators, many of the designs were copied from Chinese and French prototypes. Popular Chinese imports, catering to the middle class, were copied early by the Bow factory in soft-paste porcelains, and sold at similar prices. The markets for these goods developed, however, behind high tariff walls. There were first the tariffs on East India Company imports: 121/2 per cent of value at wholesale auction prices at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and, by its end, one-half the auction value. The quantities of Asian porcelain imported were, nevertheless, staggering. The highpoint of imports during the first half of the eighteenth century, in 1721, amounted to 2 million pieces of porcelain, yielding duties of £104,375.There were import prohibitions on European porcelain until 1775, and after this date duties on French porcelain of 150 per cent. The ending of bulk imports of Chinese wares in the official trade of the East India Company in 1791 opened opportunities for English imitations of Chinese prototypes. But equally the Eden Treaty of 1786, which reduced import duties on French porcelain to 12 per cent of sale value, meant competition from French factories now also making more simply decorated wares.²⁷ The Eden Treaty opened opportunities in Europe for the sale of Staffordshire ware, but equally English domestic markets for porcelain now faced the challenge of European competitors. These markets for porcelain among the middle ranks were taken a great deal further by the development of fine earthenware. The market for earthenware, as the basic ware of kitchens and dairies, and the basic tableware of the labouring poor, of small artisans and tradespeople, extended into new luxury and fashion markets in the eighteenth century. Fine earthenware was developed for tableware, and here new qualities of taste and aesthetics, manners, and eating cultures could be combined with technology and industrial development. The result was the huge opportunities offered by a new commodity; with prices even moderately lower than those of porcelain, extensive new markets opened. Between 1680 and 1710 the number of potteries increased by 47 per cent, and employment went up by 70 per cent. But between 1745 and 1780 the number of potteries (many of these now much larger than those established earlier) rose again by 25 per cent, and employment expanded by ten times its level in 1745. After the boom years for domestic markets between 1749 and 1753, there were yet greater gains to be made in export markets, which doubled between 1785 and 1800.²⁸ ²⁷ Geoffrey A. Godden, Eighteenth-Century English Porcelain (St Albans, 1985), 20; Young, English Porcelain, 74–5, 80. ²⁸ Weatherill, ‘The Growth of the Pottery Industry’, 25–8.

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Glass and Chinaware

Technology, Labour, and Networks British porcelain producers sought out imitations of oriental and European porcelains. Without the patronage of the court or the monopoly of the East India Company, they searched for native ingredients and new technologies which could produce a commodity that would appeal to the market for both useful wares and ornamental goods. Some of this production was, to be sure, directed solely at aristocratic markets, attempting to achieve an international reputation in luxury markets. Patents and projects for new ceramics processes abounded; forty-eight were taken out over the period 1671–1818. Eight of these were for porcelain imitations, as against five for earthenware and two for delftware. Twelve patents were taken out for finishing and decorating, and twelve for machinery and processing.²⁹ The most famed patent for English porcelain was the Champion and Cookworthy patent for hard-paste porcelain using kaolin and petuntse discovered in Cornwall. The composition of these ingredients and their firing were finally perfected in 1768 and patented, but an extension to the patent after 1775 was only allowed for ‘transparent’ porcelain. This opened opportunities for other potters to use the process for ‘opaque’ pottery, and in a much more refined earthenware.³⁰ Of greater significance to the extension of markets for porcelain were the soft-paste porcelains made with bone ash, first at Bow in 1749 then at Lowestoft, Chelsea, Derby, and West Pans. These were used both in making figures and models in imitation of Meissen and Sèvres, and in making wide ranges of useful tablewares.There were disadvantages to the process: it required hazardous biscuit firing and a lead glaze followed by another firing to make the wares impervious to liquids, unlike hard-paste porcelains which were glazed and fired in a single operation. And the results were slightly different—a blurring and softening of surface detailing and modelling. But English bone china could be made at a much lower cost; it could tap the middle-rank markets opened initially by oriental porcelain, and it could make imitations of the decorated figures of Europe’s porcelain works a popular middling-class collectable. Indeed the Derby factory was mainly devoted to meeting the great demand during the second part of the eighteenth century for enamelled and decorated figures.³¹ If bone china produced a cheaper but nevertheless highly attractive alternative to European and oriental porcelains, then several of Britain’s other ²⁹ Abridgments of the Patent Specifications Relating to Pottery (prepared by Dugald Campbell) (London, 1863). ³⁰ Godden, Eighteenth-Century English Porcelain, 214. ³¹ Young, English Porcelain, 18–19.

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How it was Made factories also found their own ingredients. Early Bristol and later Worcester porcelains used Cornish soap rock. The Longton Hall Works in Staffordshire from the middle of the century, and the West Pans factory from 1764, produced large quantities of domestic ware—ewers and basins, tankards, tea and coffee pots, tea and coffee services in simple forms, decorated in blue and white. Lowestoft produced inexpensive soft-paste useful wares for local markets, imitating Chinese imports in underglaze blue patterns. The Caughley works later in the century produced a durable and workable soapstone type of porcelain similar to Worcester, and made useful tablewares decorated in underglaze blue that could undersell the Worcester porcelains.³² Seeking new materials, mixes, and recipes to make a more cost-effective product was also the priority of contemporary earthenware producers. The competition was on from early in the eighteenth century to produce a white pottery that could compete with imported porcelain, with stoneware and with the soft white-coloured delftware made in Bristol and London. White ball clay together with ground flint were used from the first decade of the eighteenth century to produce a white salt-glaze ware. Creamware, a fine lead-glazed earthenware, seems first to have been made in Staffordshire in the 1730s, and it quickly took over pre-existing markets for delftware.³³ A liquid lead glaze was used from the 1740s on tortoiseshell ware and creamware. White stonewares were also made by the 1740s.These were thin, light, and translucent, compared favourably in hardness with Chinese porcelain, and could be decorated like oriental porcelain. The invention of creamware was comparable in its effect to that of bone china. While bone china opened up a middling-class market for porcelain, creamware transformed the former markets for brown and drab earthenwares. It made possible a rapidly expanding market for fine tableware among ordinary tradespeople as well as the middling classes. By the early 1700s 46 per cent of the inventories of a sample of people from ordinary trades and yeoman families listed pottery among their effects.³⁴ Imitation was the keynote of creamwares as much as it was of bone china. But when Wedgwood developed these further he represented them as a new invention. Earlier he produced green glaze wares in the shape of cauliflowers, pineapples, melons, and lemons, producing in a cheaper format the ideas of the Meissen porcelain works. But his creamware was a more farreaching development. He described creamware in 1763 as ‘a species of ³² Godden, Eighteenth-Century English Porcelain, 56, 67, 194, 214. ³³ Reilly, Wedgwood, i. 184. ³⁴ Weatherill, The Pottery Trade, 15, 29–30; Hughes, English and Scottish Earthenware, 54; Weatherill, ‘The Growth of the Pottery Industry’, 25.

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Glass and Chinaware earthenware for the table quite new in its appearance, covered with a rich and brilliant glaze bearing sudden alterations of heat and cold, manufactured with ease and expedition, and consequently cheap having every requisite for the purpose intended’.³⁵ Creamware could be turned on the wheel, cast, or turned on the lathe. Wedgwood made creamware his leading good; indeed virtually a brand. But in fact creamware was a specialty of a number of Staffordshire potters, and produced as well in Bristol, Derby, and Swansea.³⁶ Its biggest producer next to Wedgwood was the Leeds Pottery of Hartley, Green & Co. Wedgwood did have some interest in manufacturing a native porcelain, and spent £500 on an American venture to bring 6 tons of kaolin from the Appalachian mountains in 1766. But he abandoned this high-cost option, turning instead to further innovation on his creamware.³⁷ Fashion markets for the new tableware moved rapidly; his competitors drove hard and fast around him. Innovation was a necessity not an option. He pushed to produce a more refined, whiter creamware. He achieved this in 1768 with his Queen’s ware, but went on in 1775, after the end of William Cookworthy’s monopoly on Cornish china clay, to produce a body even closer to porcelain. Incorporating china clay and china stone into the body of creamware produced a finer, whiter body, eminently suited to the new simple forms of the neoclassical. Other potters produced whiter ware called ‘china glaze’ in 1775, and Wedgwood countered with a ‘pearl white’ in 1779.³⁸ These technological achievements in the composition or ‘body’ of the ceramics are just one side of the story; craft skills and inventions in decorating were just as vital. The greatness of Europe’s porcelain works was founded in the fame of the sculptors, painters, and modellers they employed. Britain’s porcelain works also employed high proportions of decorators and modellers. Bow’s 300-strong workforce included 90 painters. Freelance modellers were employed in both the porcelain and the earthenware trades. Wedgwood employed about seventy independent designers and modellers from 1770 onwards. He commissioned artists for patterns—William Flaxman, Joseph Wright, and William Blake were only the most celebrated; there were also Peter Perez Burdett, Samuel Alken, and William Hackwood. Enamelling and painting, carried out either in the factories or in ³⁵ Finer and Savage, Selected Letters, 7. ³⁶ Hughes, English and Scottish Earthenware, 105, 110, 121; Finer and Savage, Selected Letters, 10. ³⁷ Reilly, Wedgwood, i. 20. ³⁸ Miller, Martin, and Dickinson,‘Changing Consumption Patterns’, 5; George L. Miller and Robert Hunter,‘How Creamware Got the Blues:The Origins of China Glaze and Pearlware’, in Robert Hunter (ed.), Ceramics in America (Milwaukee, 2001), 135–61.

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How it was Made

Fig. 4.3. Josiah Wedgwood, 1782. Sir Joshua Reynolds. Trustees of the Wedgwood Museum, Barlaston, Staffs.

independent workshops, depended on a group of workers trained in decoration across the luxury trades—in toymaking, japan painting, and papier mâché, in fan painting, and miniatures. A significant amount of decoration was carried out by china dealers; some, like the celebrated James Giles, painted European motifs on oriental blanks, and worked completely independently decorating thousands of pieces of Worcester. Wages of decorators were high, and workforces unstable as decorators were easily seduced from one factory to another. At Derby most of the decorators received 3s. 6d. a day in 1794.³⁹ The division of labour associated by historians with the Wedgwood factory was practised right across the industry. Decorating was just as ‘divided’. ³⁹ Hughes, English and Scottish Earthenware, 97; Godden, Eighteenth-Century English Porcelain, 179; Young, English Porcelain, 142; Bemrose, Bow, Chelsea and Derby Porcelain, 95–109.

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Glass and Chinaware Table 4.2. Wages paid by John Whieldon, 1750–1751, 1760–1765 1750–1

Skilled labour (turning, throwing) Less skilled labour (slipmakers, flintmill grinding) Women’s labour Boy labour Girl labour

1760–5

Weekly wage

Yearly retainer

Weekly wage

Yearly retainer

8s.

£2 2s.

7s.–9s.

£1 10s.

5s. 6d.–6s. 6d.

2s. 6d.–10s. 6d.

5s. 6d.–6s. 6d.

2s. 6d.–5s.

— 1s. 8d.–2s. 8d. 1s.–1s. 6d.

— 6d.–1s. —

2s. 10d.–22d. 18d.–2s.

1s. — 1s.

Note: Payments in kind including coats, stockings, or shirt material were also sometimes added to cash payments. Source: Arnold R. Mountford, ‘Thomas Wedgwood, John Wedgwood and Jonah Malkin, Potters of Burslem’ (MA thesis, University of Keele, 1972), City Museum and Art Gallery, stoke-on-treat, 65–7.

Craftsmen in the earthenware works were paid on average 9s. a week in the 1760s, labourers 6s., women 2s. 6d. to 3s. a week and children 1s. Hierarchies were established in decorating, with blue and white work considered to be routine, often consisting of the standardized copying of existing patterns. Women were targeted for this work, just as they were for calico painting in Lancashire and for decorating in the Midlands metalware trades. Potters such as Whieldon trained children up to flowering: little Bel Blow was taken on at wages starting at 1s. a week in her first year, rising to 1s. 6d. a week in her third.⁴⁰ These wages paid by one potter reflected wider practices in Staffordshire. Wages of skilled craftsmen averaged 6s. a week at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and rose to 9s. a week by the early 1760s; they were paid more than many other provincial craftsmen and agricultural labourers, but less than those in the building trades. Labourers were paid much less, about 6s. a week in the 1760s, and wages were much more unstable. Boys and women received still less, between 2s. and 4s., and even less for children.⁴¹ Wedgwood himself, aware of the shortage of good decorators, having suffered frequent losses of his apprentices to his competitors, especially Palmers, wrote to Bentley that he would get all he could done in such a ⁴⁰ Weatherill, The Pottery Trade, 99–108; Young, English Porcelain, 131; Whieldon Papers, Notebook on Hiring and Wages, Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford, p. 66. ⁴¹ Weatherill, The Pottery Trade, 98–104.

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Fig. 4.4. Weekly wages of craftsmen, labourers, women, and young people in pottery manufacture Source: L. Weatherill, The Pottery Trade and North Staffordshire 1660–1760 (Manchester, 1971).

manner as Catherine Wilcox, his leading decorator, a japanner, or a fan painter, could do, but ‘few hands can be got to paint flowers in the style we want them . . . you must be content to train up such painters as offer to you and not turn them adrift because they cannot immediately form their hands to our new stile’.⁴² The real opportunities for dramatically reducing the costs of decorating came with another technological innovation—transfer printing. The process of transferring a printed design from an engraved copperplate onto a sheet of paper, and from there onto ceramics or enamelled copper, was discovered in 1750–1 by John Brooks, an Irish engraver working at the time in Birmingham. His patent applications for ‘a method of printing upon enamel and china from engraved, etched or mezzotinto plates’ all failed. His process had a context—the Birmingham toy trades, another popular new luxury trade. Transfer-printed japanned goods had been available for some years. Robert Hancock, another Birmingham engraver, introduced transfer printing at Bow, then at Worcester. But simultaneously the Liverpool printer John Sadler developed a method of transfer printing on delftware tiles. Competitive innovation was intense. The Worcester factory in 1759–60 achieved underglaze transfer printing in cobalt blue, and it spread rapidly to other factories. Sadler and Green, shortly after this, set up an arrangement with Wedgwood for printing his creamware; they printed a huge volume of ⁴² Wedgwood to Bentley, 8 Sept. 1772 (Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele); Wedgwood to Bentley, 19 May 1770, repr. in Finer and Savage, Selected Letters, 92.

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Glass and Chinaware this between 1761 and 1790.The arrangement to print the wares soon moved on to one of selling Wedgwood wares through their shop and in Ireland and America.⁴³ Sadler and Green also printed on white porcelain that came from other Liverpool manufacturers and from Longton Hall and Worcester. The Herculaneum Pottery, when this was established in Liverpool in 1796, was soon acclaimed for its transfer-printed ware. Transfer-printed ware was the market leader of a new international commodity. Merchants sold overglaze black printing extensively in US markets, and underglaze blue-printed earthenwares became extremely popular in domestic and American markets at the turn of the century.⁴⁴ Transfer printing was just as dependent on the arts as was hand decoration. Manufacturers sought out designs in the mezzotint and graphic print trades. Patterns were adapted from collections of illustrations for the manufactured arts such as that of Mathias Darley and George Edwards, Drawings in the Chinese, Gothic and Modern Taste for any Manufactory Business, and Engraving of any Kind in Architecture, Ornament, Landscape, Heraldry etc., or the New Book of Chinese Design (1754) and Robert Sayer’s Complete Drawing Book, 113 Copper Plates from Le Clerc, Le Brun, Barlow, Bergham and Chaltain (1758). Sadler and Green employed several well-known engravers, including also, for a short time, Peter Perez Burdett.⁴⁵ The complementary connection made between Wedgwood’s creamware production and Sadler and Green’s transfer printing was one celebrated example of the extensive networking between potters and others in the luxury trades. Potters frequently sold their ware to other potters, who might sell it on with their own wares, or decorate it and sell it. The Malkin pottery between 1747 and 1749 sold some of its wares to Sampson Bagnall of Hanley, and more to Enoch Booth, Joseph Warburton, Joseph Farmer, and Thomas Simpson. Malkin also sold to his brother-in-law Thomas Wedgwood and to John Wedgwood.⁴⁶ Josiah Wedgwood too contracted with other potters and with some glass manufacturers for wares that he then sold on. He had accounts with ⁴³ Young, English Porcelain, 64; Hughes, English and Scottish Earthenware, 109, 125–7; Gaye Blake Roberts, ‘Printing in Liverpool: The Association between Wedgwood and Sadler and Green’, Journal of the Northern Ceramics Society, 14 (1997), 45–70, for the association between Wedgwood and Sadler and Green, pp. 45–67, pp. 46, 50. ⁴⁴ Brown and Lockett (eds.), Made in Liverpool, 39–41. ⁴⁵ See Clayton, The English Print; Roberts, ‘Printing in Liverpool’, 57. ⁴⁶ Arnold R. Mountford, ‘Thomas Wedgwood, John Wedgwood and Jonah Malkin, Potters of Burslem: Analysis of Certain Unpublished Eighteenth-Century Documentary Sources with Particular Reference to the Manufacture and Distribution of Earthenware and Stoneware’ (MA thesis, University of Keele, 1972), 67.

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How it was Made members of his own family—John and Thomas Wedgwood—but also with Jesse Wood, William, John, and Ralph Wood, John Edge, Willliam Greatbatch, William Greaves, Richard and Sarah Meir, Ralph Mountford, Thomas Taylor, Thomas Lowe, and William Turner, all in Burslem. He took more pottery from Samuel Parkes, William Turner, Joseph Warburton, and John Wood, and glassware from Hancock & Shepherd and Robert Honeybone of Stourbridge. Wedgwood not only sold on goods acquired from other firms, but relied on outside expertise for engraving, japanning, mounting, and finishing. He networked closely with decorators and finishers in Birmingham. From the 1770s to the 1790s, several Birmingham toy manufacturers—James Archer, James Bayley, Bentley & White, Joseph Pearson, Samuel Pemberton & Son, Thomas Warner, William Smith, Nathaniel, Mary, & G. Pollard, and Whitworth & Company—supplied him with bezels (the grooves and flanges for settings) for seals, blanks for cameos, burnished and gilt frames, and steel mountings for buttons. The well-known Birmingham japanner, Henry Clay, worked with Wedgwood on tea caddies and trays. His major collaborator, of course, was that other juggernaut of the new luxury trades, Matthew Boulton. He kept weekly accounts during the 1780s and 1790s with Boulton & Co. and with Boulton and Scale.⁴⁷ Wedgwood also sent Boulton cameos and seals for setting in all manner of boxes, bracelets, lockets, and buttons. But he did not deal exclusively with Boulton, and indeed was feeling the heat of competition from Palmer’s imitations of his ware. Wedgwood reported his trip to Birmingham to Bentley, regretting that he had given over too much time at Soho to the neglect of Birmingham. ‘I found it would be worth much more attention, and I think we have suffer’d very much in neglecting it so long. It has every appearance of being a rich mine and I doubt not will pay well for the working . . . At Birmingham I found Palmer and Voyez had sold a good many seals merely because the Factors and Merchants could come at them easily . . . Palmer has an Agent there who applys to the Merchants etc. for him . . . There is near 100 Factors and Merchants in Birmingham and these should know that our seals may be [bought] and where.’⁴⁸ But the Birmingham factors created stiff competition. One of the Birmingham toymen reported: ‘I am sorry to find on shewing your cameos to my workmen that they say they buy ⁴⁷ ‘Services’ (Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele, 1419–45). Services included enamel and gold work, engraving, mounting, painting, repairing, finished articles (including cameos, display cases, seals, silverware, toy cutlery, trays and writing boxes) and ware purchased by Wedgwood & Co. ⁴⁸ Wedgwood to Bentley, 22 Nov. 1773, in Finer and Savage, Selected Letters, 154–6.

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Fig. 4.5. Punchbowl and stand. Queen’s ware enamelled in red and black, 1790–5. Diameter 20 cm. V & A Images, Victoria and Albert Museum.

them at half the price you charge them at and shew’d me some of them sett—they get them from another person in London.’⁴⁹ Wedgwood tapped national, not just regional specialists. To be sure, he sent goods between the 1770s and 1790s for painting and enamelling to Cooper Glover, and to William Dawson, and to James Wilson & Co. of Burslem for gilding and enamelling. But for printing and engraving he relied not just on Sadler, Green & Co. of Liverpool, but also on William Darling, a London printseller, Charles Dickin, Fletcher & Tittensor of Shelton, and Robinson & Smith. He used a London cabinetmaker, John Folgham, for cases and tableware, and Hoskings & Oliver for moulds, casts, models, figures, busts, and vases.⁵⁰

Markets and Transport The extensive networks established not just within Staffordshire, but right across the country, in the production, finishing, and decorating of ceramics ⁴⁹ Joseph Green to Wedgwood, 18 Sept. 1788 (Wedgwood Business Correspondence, Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele). ⁵⁰ ‘Services’ (Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele, 1419–45).

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How it was Made followed the patterns set by the luxury trades. In the porcelain trades, craftsmen and decorators travelled a Europe-wide network of factories and finishing shops. Earthenware manufacturers also deployed the skills of finishers and decorators in far-flung parts of the country. Transportation of these fragile wares, not just for finishing, but also for marketing, must have proved a formidable challenge. Fine oriental porcelains had long been transported about the country by chinamen and pedlars, but this was on a relatively small scale in comparison with the trade of the last half of the eighteenth century. Most of the carriers were very small scale, with approximately nine horses each, and each packhorse carried crates of wares of approximately one to two hundredweight. Weatherill has calculated that 10,000 crates of ware were taken out of Staffordshire in the 1740s; this entailed 200 packhorse journeys to rivers in an average week. In a much more sophisticated and extensive network of trade in the 1790s, the packhorse was still central. John Byng, visiting Lane End in the Staffordshire Potteries in 1792, wrote, ‘Hundreds of horses and asses with paniers, are incessantly taking in their lading.’⁵¹ Transport was slow, but systematic, and markets and information networks were much more highly integrated than we might expect. The mail came three times a week from Stoke to Burslem in 1760, and once a week from Newcastle. The journey from London to Birmingham, approximately 114 miles, took two days in 1755 by the Old Flying Stage Coach; this was cut to nineteen hours twenty years later. The coach from London to Bristol, about 120 miles, took sixteen hours in 1784. The journey from London to Manchester in 1772 took two days in the summer and three in the winter; that to Leeds took two and half days in 1769. By the 1770s every provincial centre had a direct scheduled service to London. These journey times were slashed during the early nineteenth century, and road passenger mileage from London to a number of provincial destinations rose elevenfold between 1773 and 1816, from 183,000 to 2,043,000. Freight traffic was, of course, much slower. The ‘pot wagons’ or panniered mules took two days to go from Staffordshire to Liverpool. Nevertheless, road networks between distant parts of the country and London were firmly established by the 1770s, then the canal system was added between 1766 and 1800, though freight charges on earthenware were high. Freight traffic

⁵¹ Cited in Hillier, Pottery and Porcelain, 187.

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(a) The potteries to Chester overland; coastal journey via River Dee (b) overland to Winsford; river journey to Liverpool on the River Weaver. Route opened in 1733, replaced (a) Overland to Bridgnorth, river journey on the Severn to Bristol. Open for the whole period Overland to Willington after 1700; river journey to Hull on the River Trent

Fig. 4.6. Routes by which pottery was taken out of Staffordshire 1660‒1760. Source: Weatherill, The Pottery Trade and North Staffordshire 1660–1760.

increased an estimated 240 per cent in ton miles per week over the period 1765 to 1826.⁵² These transport developments over the course of the century, while phenomenal, enhanced but did not transform the routes previously followed by the luxury trades. Merchants selling imports from Europe and the Far East, or goods made by the delftware potters in London and Bristol, supplied the early eighteenth-century markets for fine wares in many parts of the country. Similarly early buyers for Staffordshire stonewares in all parts of the country bought their wares through London networks. But better roads, and subsequently canals, meant more markets; from 1740 John Wedgwood was selling to Bristol and Newcastle, and from there to Irish and American ⁵² Finer and Savage, Selected Letters, 12; Barnett, London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution, 184, 188; J. A. Chartres and G. L. Turnbull, ‘Road Transport’, in D. H. Aldcroft and M. J. Freeman (eds.), Transport in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1983); Gaye Blake Roberts, ‘Wedgwood to America: Trading Concerns during the 18th Century’, Ars Ceramica, 4 (1987), 4–8, p. 4.

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How it was Made markets.⁵³ His account books indicate the routes by which an extensive national trade was established from Staffordshire from at least the 1750s. Ware was transported frequently to London by sea, or via Lichfield. Or it was sent via Newhaven to Sussex. It went to Liverpool via Chester, and to Newcastle-on-Tyne via Hull; from Newcastle it went to Leith to serve markets in Edinburgh. Other destinations included Swindon and Cirencester via Gloucester, Hereford via Worcester, Glasgow via Sheffield, and Dublin via Chester.⁵⁴ Though most of the earthenware manufacture was concentrated in Staffordshire, its many manufacturers sold across the regions, in the metropolis, and in all the major commercial centres and ports.Trading through these latter centres in particular gave them access to the outlets served by the much more dispersed porcelain makers. Though spread across the country, the porcelain works were sited at the nodes of good communications networks. Many were set up in London, or in major ports such as Bristol, Liverpool, and Plymouth, and looked out to the global markets of the international luxury trade. Other works, Derby, Worcester, Caughley, and Coalport, as well as the Staffordshire producers, Longton Hall, New Hall, and Baddeley, were situated near good transport to the ports or to London. The porcelain manufacturers assumed international urban and luxury markets, and focused on trade to London. The routes from the regions to London were based on those formed in reverse by the china men trading in oriental porcelain from London throughout the country, and on routes established from the later seventeenth century in the glass trade.⁵⁵ The trade in earthenware manufacture was also predicated on this heritage. But from the latter half of the eighteenth century extensive use was made of the northern ports, and increasingly of canal networks that linked Staffordshire not so much to the metropolis, but to regional markets, not only in the south, but in the midlands and the north. Earthenware manufacturers were now moving into the European and American trade conducted from Newcastle, Hull, and Liverpool.⁵⁶ John Wedgwood, Josiah Wedgwood’s uncle, had accounts with dealers and retailers in Abingdon, Bath, Beverley, Birmingham, and in sixty-two separate places in Bristol. He sold to eight suppliers in Sunderland between ⁵³ Weatherill, The Pottery Trade, 82–7. ⁵⁴ Mountford, ‘Thomas Wedgwood, John Wedgwood and Jonah Malkin, Potters of Burslem’, 94–5. ⁵⁵ Young, English Porcelain, 154–7; Aubrey Toppin, ‘The China Trade and Some London Chinamen’, English Ceramics Circle Transactions, 3 (1935), 37–57; Weatherill, ‘The Growth of the Pottery Industry’; Hughes, English, Scottish and Irish Table Glass, 49. 56 G. Turnbull, ‘Canals, Coal and Regional Growth during the Industrial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 40 (1987), 538–60; Pat Hudson (ed.), Regions and Industries (Cambridge, 1990).

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Glass and Chinaware 1756 and 1766. Josiah Wedgwood’s markets thirty years later were truly global. He exported 80 per cent of his total produce by 1784; from the 1770s he concentrated on promoting sales in Europe. He traded his goods directly as well as through Boulton & Fothergill in Birmingham, Bentley & Boardman and Sadler & Green in Liverpool to Dublin, Dunkirk, Nice, and Paris, to Amsterdam and Rotterdam, to Bonn, Brunswick, Dessau, Dresden and Leipzig, to Naples, Trieste, and to Venice, Malaga, to Moscow and St Petersburg. He made particular efforts in the German states, sending out parcels of goods as tasters to many of the German princes: ‘nobody can blame us for any neglect of this sort in Germany . . . we made something beyond a Gentle push—however I hope all things will work together for our good even there, & that we shall have no cause to treat the Majority of the German Princes in the end, as Hereticks, goths, or Vandals.’ The Dutch were his most reliable European customers, initially the nobility and gentry, but afterwards there was a widespread take-up of Queen’s ware, displacing the local manufacture of tin-glazed delft.⁵⁷ Wedgwood investigated market opportunities in Turkey and China; these would provide the ultimate conquest of luxury markets. To sell his modern alternatives to Persia and oriental luxury back to the perceived source of all luxury seemed a dream too good to pass up. He sought out Turkish models, read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters, and obtained models for tablewares from Sir Robert Ainslie, the British Ambassador to Constantinople. He was irritated at the reception his ware encountered. But why, one would wish to know, will not our ornaments be made acceptable to the Eastern nations? It cannot be want of luxury amongst the people, but it may be, & I am fully perswaded [sic] it is, their ignorance of our ability to gratify it in many respects . . . However the Turkish Empire is too capital a prize to be given up so easily, & I hope you will consider what articles of our Ornamental manufacture the Turks may hitherto have seen, & what farther we can make to shew them with any prospect of forming a connection with these good Musselmen.⁵⁸

He accordingly adapted his goods to suit Turkish exotic taste. Reading in Lady Wortley Montagu’s Letters of their taste for pots of perfume in the arches around their rooms, he wrote, ‘Let who will take the Sultanas . . . if I could get at these delightful little niches, & furnish them, is all I covet in Turkey at present.’⁵⁹ Bentley suggested the Chinese markets, but Wedgwood saw not market ⁵⁷ McKendrick, ‘Commercialization of the Potteries’, 135; Wedgwood to Bentley, 5 Aug. 1772 (Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele); Reilly, Wedgwood, i. 93. ⁵⁸ Reilly, Wedgwood, i. 82. ⁵⁹ McKendrick, ‘Commercialization of the Potteries’, 128, 132.

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How it was Made opportunities, but the threat of Chinese copies of his designs in porcelain. Nevertheless he sent seven of his vases with Lord Macartney to the Qianlong emperor of China in 1793.⁶⁰ Wedgwood had, instead, tapped into another ready market, not that of the Orient, but that of the British in the Orient. As we have seen earlier, he was proud of his sales by the later 1760s of creamware to the colonial administration in India.⁶¹ Selling to expatriates in the empire was a piece of inspired anticipation.⁶² Yet for all the excitement of markets in the East India Company outposts, Wedgwood was slow to develop markets in the American colonies.⁶³ White Staffordshire salt-glaze ware was exported to the American colonies from as early as the 1720s, but branded goods such as Wedgwood, Spode, or Minton were considered too expensive for the American markets until later in the century. British chinaware ultimately found its leading global markets in the Americas, and by the end of the eighteenth century, Wedgwood Queen’s ware was the most widely advertised British product in the Eastern American cities. Yet Wedgwood in the 1760s saw the American colonies and even the West Indies only as places where he could ‘dump’ his unfashionable ware. He was not alone among British manufacturers and merchants who took the view that the American market was about ‘inferior goods’, ‘cheaper ware’, wares ‘of a useful kind’, and certainly nothing ‘too rich and costly’. His first order for creamware from Boston came in 1764, and creamware did not appear in retail stores in the Chesapeake until 1768; but once it did, demand grew astoundingly rapidly, and the product was common along the eastern seaboard by the 1770s. The accounts for Bentley & Boardman trading Wedgwood creamware to the Americas show sales during the months of April, May, and December alone in 1771 of over £1,200.⁶⁴ By the last twenty years of the century, some of Wedgwood’s highest luxury ware was exported to Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, South Carolina: crates of ‘a neat good assortment of Queens china tea pots gilt & letter’d’ or ‘Queens, Enamel’d and the newest fashiond Ware’. Charlotte Hammett’s store in ⁶⁰ Reilly, Wedgwood, i. 87, 143. ⁶¹ Wedgwood to Bentley, 8 Sept. 1767, in Finer and Savage, Selected Letters, 271. ⁶² See E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, 1800–1947 (Cambridge, 2001). The choice of Wedgwood creamware over Chinese porcelain was a part of a wider process of ‘Anglicization’ of lifestyles of the British merchants and administrators in India, see esp. pp. 50–80. ⁶³ Neil Ewins, ‘ “Supplying the Present Wants of our Yankee Cousins . . .”: Staffordshire Ceramics and the American Market 1775–1880’, Journal of Ceramic History, 15 (1997), 18–20. ⁶⁴ Miller, Martin, and Dickinson, ‘Changing Consumption Patterns’, 17; Blake Roberts, ‘Wedgwood to America’, 5; Gaye Blake Roberts, ‘Patterns of Trade in the 18th Century’, English Ceramics Circle, 14 (1990), 93–105, p. 98.

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Glass and Chinaware Table 4.3. Charlotte Hammett’s Staffordshire & Glass Warehouse, Charleston, South Carolina, 1791 per dozen Large Queen’s ware plates Dessert Queen’s ware plates Large Blue & Green Edge plates Blue & Green dessert plates Elegant Blue and White, Breakfast sets

1s. 9d. 1s. 4d. 3s. 2d. 2s. 4d. 9s. 4d.

Source: Neil Ewins, ‘ “Supplying the Present Wants of our Yankee Cousins . . .”: Staffordshire Ceramics and the American Market 1775–1880’, Journal of Ceramic History, 15 (1997), 20.

Charleston in 1791 was selling Queen’s ware and blue and white ware at the prices shown in Table 4.3. Wedgwood, like other earthenware and porcelain manufacturers, sold his goods both directly to dealers, retailers, and individuals, and through factors, merchants, and other manufacturers. At home he dealt directly with retailers such as Ann Brett of Birmingham who sold seals, cameos, busts, pyramids, and other ornamental ware over the ten years between 1777 and 1787. Her invoices with Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton totalled £1204 12s. 6d. for 24 July 1778. Wedgwood employed riders to promote his products to shopkeepers and private customers throughout the regions, and also, significantly, to collect debts owed him. He also sold on international markets in a close complementary connection to Boulton. Cases of earthenware samples bound for Germany were sent first to Birmingham for Boulton to add books of drawings of hardwares and hardware samples.⁶⁵

Selling Retailing chinaware, like that of glassware, was highly sophisticated. There were china shops in the New Exchange in the Strand in the early eighteenth century, and by mid-century these were widely distributed. A significant proportion of china dealers were women such as Ann Brett or Mary ⁶⁵ Wedgwood Papers, E6-4261-4290; E6-30608-30609 (University of Keele); Young, English Porcelain, 167; Boulton and Walker to Wedgwood, 17 Feb. 1788, 22 Mar. 1788, 2 Apr. 1788, 27 May 1788, 8 Dec 1788, 28 Mar. 1783 and 25 June 1783 (Wedgwood Business Correspondence, Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele).

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How it was Made Rollason, both of Birmingham and both trading on a large scale. Goldsmiths, jewellers, toymen, and even confectioners sold porcelain among other luxury goods. ‘Confectioners found their trade moulder away, while toymen and china-shops were the only fashionable purveyors of the last stage of fashionable entertainments. Women of the first quality came home from [Mrs.] Chenevix’s laden with dolls and babies [of porcelain], not for their children, but for their housekeeper.’⁶⁶ Porcelain was also sold in showrooms on the factory site, or in London warehouses, and extensively through auctions.⁶⁷ Fine earthenware was sold in a manner much the same as oriental and English porcelain. Wedgwood first set up show rooms at Newport Street at the time Boulton was taking out a room in Pall Mall. ‘Oh what courseing there will be from Pell Mell to Newport Street, and from Newport Street to Pell Mell. All as St. Paul said of some other Citizens, to hear, or tell, or see some strange thing.’⁶⁸ He decided against locating too closely to Boulton, but also thought Pall Mall too accessible to the common people. Wedgwood was also apprised of the principles of display; his show room was not a collection of stock, but a modern gallery. He sought out large rooms to display his table and dessert services laid out completely on two ranges of tables ‘in order to do the needful with the Ladys in the neatest, genteelest and best method’. His vases would decorate the walls, and displays would be changed frequently, so that even the same people would keep coming, as if to a new exhibition. He saw this attention to shop display pay off. ‘Every new show, Exhibition or rarity soon grows stale in London . . . The first two days after the alteration we sold three complete setts of Vases at 2 & 3 guineas a set, besides many pairs of them, which Vases had been in my Rooms 6–8 and some of them 12 months & wanted nothing but arrang[e]ment to sell them.’ Both Wedgwood and Duesbury set up a system of admission tickets when they displayed the Frog service and a Derby porcelain dessert service being designed for the court in Peking in 1774 and 1775 respectively.⁶⁹ Wedgwood thought out his strategy for his London and Bath showrooms in the context of the competition of other luxury retailers, attempting to convey a sense of restrained and aesthetic repose amongst the excess of other luxury goods. His comments bear repeating in full. I am not without some little pain for our Nobility & Gentry themselves, for what with the fine things in Gold, Silver & Steel from Soho, the almost miraculous ⁶⁶ ⁶⁷ ⁶⁸ ⁶⁹

Horace Walpole, The World (1753), cited in Young, English Porcelain, 161. Young, English Porcelain, 161–5. Wedgwood to Bentley, 27 Sept. 1766, in Finer and Savage, Selected Letters, 80–1. McKendrick, ‘Commercialization of the Potteries’, 118, 119; Young, English Porcelain, 170.

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Glass and Chinaware magnificence of Mr. Coxes Exhibition, & the Glare of the Derby & other China shews—What heads, or Eyes could stand all this dazzling profusion of riches & ornament if something was not provided for their relief, to give them at proper intervals a little relaxation & repose. Under this humble idea then, I have some hopes for our black, Etruscan, & Grecian Vases still, & as I expect the Golden surfeit will rage with you higher than ever this Spring, I shall almost tremble even for a gilt listel amongst your Vases, & would advise you by all means to provide a curtain immediately for your Pebble ware shelves, which you may open or shut, inlarge or diminish the shew of gilding as you find your customers affected. In earnest I believe a Curtain before the shelves of pebble vases would be very proper on several accounts. It would moderate the shew at the first entrance—hide the Gilding from those who think it a defect, & prevent the Gold from tarnishing.⁷⁰

Wedgwood, like Boulton and like many of the Birmingham brassware and other fine metalware producers, also used catalogues to sell his ware, especially in international markets. He first thought of producing a catalogue in 1772, and issued his first catalogue of ornamental ware in 1773. He considered a catalogue printed in French to send with simple boxes of patterns, but issued a Catalogue of Queen’s ware in 1774. This consisted of ten plates engraved by John Pye who worked as an engraver for Sadler & Green, for the printseller John Boydell, and for Matthew Boulton. He had supplied views for the Frog service in 1773. A useful ware catalogue with thirteen plates and eighty numbered shapes and text in French was in proof in 1790, but does not appear to have been published.⁷¹ The text of his catalogue of 1774, ‘A Catalogue of Cameos, Intaglios, Medals, Busts, Small Statues and Bas-reliefs with a general account of Vases and Other Ornaments after the Antique’, was an exercise in the arts of imitation. He discussed four different classes of goods, terracotta, basalt, white porcelain, and jasper, in terms of their similarity to porphyry, Egyptian pebble, and crystalline stone, or as bodies of exquisite beauty like no other ancient or modern. From these substances were made cameos, intaglios, bas-reliefs, and medallions based on works of antiquity and classic subjects. Escritoires were made on ‘new and philosophical construction’. Busts, statues, lamps and candelabra, ornamental vases, and bas-relief ornaments were made in imitation of jasper, porphyry, pebble, and other stones, with ‘encaustic paintings from the ancient etruscan vases and finest Grecian Gems’. Wedgwood’s catalogue was a fine example of ‘modern luxury’. It advertised the luxury of the ancients, the vases, the gems and precious ⁷⁰ Wedgwood to Bentley, 18 Apr. 1772 (Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele). ⁷¹ Reilly, Wedgwood, i. 327–40.

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How it was Made stones, but equally it displayed the modernity of the latest materials and technologies. The basalts were to serve as a ‘touchstone for metals, striking fire with steel, bearing to be made red hot in a furnace without injury, admitting of a polish equal to the native stone; and like that, resisting the strongest acids’. The white porcelain had ‘a smooth wax-like surface’, but ‘equally resisting the attacks of all acids’.⁷² These modern luxuries were carefully costed and priced to fit into the luxury retail settings for which they were intended. Wedgwood set out to limit the sales of his vases in the winter of 1766 to four types only—flue pebble, variegated pebble, black etruscan, and etruscan encaustic. The variation to be offered was in sizes, forms, and ornaments, gilding, veining, and basreliefs; this would provide ‘variety enough for our reasonable customers’. He proposed to push his encaustic painted vases hard, for he expected these to be imitated as soon as they were seen. James Cox’s celebrated luxury toy shop sold the vases among objects in silver and gold, fine timepieces and automata.⁷³

Prices Wedgwood’s pricing policies had little, of course, to do with production costs. In the highly competitive markets for chinaware and earthenware of the last half of the eighteenth century, he chose the high road of designerware pricing. He priced his goods well above those of his fellow potters. Not just his ornamental ware, but also his useful tableware he priced twice to three times as high as prevailing prices.⁷⁴ If we turn first to such high luxury items as the vases, Wedgwood costed his vases at between 2s. 43/4d. for a 51/2-inch black vase and 7s. 111/2d. for a 14inch black Medallion vase. Similar cost ranges covered his pebble and gilt plain vases. Actual production costs for his smallest basic vase came to 91/2d. In 1778 he introduced a cheaper teapot to reduce the price gap with his nearest rival, Palmer and Neale. ‘Mr. Palmer sells his three sizes of black fluted teapots at 18/- the long dozns. that is @ 9.d 1/- & 18.d per pot which we sell at 50 or 60/-.’⁷⁵ Thirty potters in 1770 bound themselves to a price list, and in 1773 they agreed to lower their prices a further 20 per cent. Wedgwood, however, ⁷² ‘A Catalogue of Cameos . . .’, E50-599994-2399995, 299997-8 A–B, L25–4211–12 (Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele). ⁷³ Wedgwood to Bentley, 27 Sept. 1766 and 21 Nov. 1768, in Finer and Savage, Selected Letters, 80–1 and 68–9. ⁷⁴ McKendrick, ‘Commercialization of the Potteries’, 105. ⁷⁵ Ibid.

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Glass and Chinaware Table 4.4. Costs of producing Wedgwood vases, 1772 Type Black Vase Black Vase Black Medallion Black Medallion

Size (inches)

Cost of production

51/2 9 12 14

2s. 43/4d. 4s. 51/2d. 5s. 71/2d. 7s. 111/2d.

Source: Josiah Wedgwood’s ‘Price Book of Workmanship’, W/M 1780, n.d. [Aug. 1772], cited in Robin Reilly, Wedgwood, vol. i (London, 1989), 694–5.

decided to maintain his price levels. This meant that most of the potters charged two shillings and sixpence to three shillings per dozen for plates, with Wedgwood’s prices at five shillings per dozen. For some goods this left Wedgwood charging three times the prices of others. Even the very best of his competitors for such high-class products as jasper, William Adams, could undercut Wedgwood’s prices by 20 per cent.⁷⁶ General prices per dozen of common Staffordshire creamware were much lower—at three shillings a dozen or threepence each during the 1770s.⁷⁷ John Wedgwood’s sale account book provided wholesale rather than retail prices. He sold his goods at these prices to other potters and to dealers. At a similar time he was selling a range of commodities including those shown in Table 4.5. We can compare these prices in the 1770s with those recorded at a London warehouse in the 1790s and the first decade of the nineteenth century. From 1794 John Willie’s glass-cutting workshop and warehouse also stocked Staffordshire pottery. He bought black basalt, smear-glaze stoneware, printed earthenware, and some creamware in the middle to lower price range from a small number of Staffordshire manufacturers. He then sold these onward to china and glass retailers, to publicans and innkeepers needing regular supplies of glass and pottery, and to some hawkers and local private individuals.⁷⁸ He was sold these wares at a customary 121/2 per cent discount, though some firms such as Hollins, Warburton & Co. (New Hall) offered a 25 per cent discount for prompt payment. ⁷⁶ Ibid. 107. ⁷⁷ Ibid. 137. ⁷⁸ Ann Eatwell and Alex Werner, ‘A London Staffordshire Warehouse—1794–1825’, Journal of the Northern Ceramics Society, 8 (1991), 91–124, p. 92.

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How it was Made Table 4.5. John Wedgwood: selected sales and prices to china sellers, 1770 £ s. d. To Eliza Watson—29 Sept. 1770 4 doz table plates plain 2/2 doz breakfast plates 18d. 2 quart teapots 3 doz of cups 2 doz saucers 18/24 table plates nickel edges plain 3 flewted 18s. cream teapots cost 7s. pr. doz 8d. each To Rachel Jacob—28 Sept. 1770 8 doz plain table plates 2/3 2 ash piece teapots 9 To Eliza King—20 Sept. 1770 12 black teapots 18s. 12 white natched teapots 2 doz cups 2 doz saucers

8-0 3-0 1-0 7-6 4-8 2-0 1-0-3 7-6 2-6 4-0 5-0

Source: John Wedgwood’s Crate Book, 1770, printed in Mountford, ‘Thomas Wedgwood, John Wedgwood and Jonah Malkin, Potters of Burslem’, 4–18.

Taste The huge expansion in the market for ceramics had its roots in the same cultural shifts that affected glassware. Increasing refinement, presentation at table, and polite culture, as well as concern with personal hygiene, stimulated the production of goods for personal use. From the ornament of the collector of Chinese antiquities in the first part of the eighteenth century, chinaware had passed by the end of the century into a British consumer good. The rise in tea drinking, sixfold in the middle of the eighteenth century, and double again by the end of the century, provided the platform to create a great variety of new objects associated with tea drinking.⁷⁹ Jonas Hanway’s Essay on Tea of 1757 showed picturesque beggars drinking tea.The Comte de la Rochefoucauld described universal tea drinking in 1784: the humblest peasant had tea twice a day just like the rich man. Tea ‘provided the rich with an opportunity to display their magnificence in the matter of tea pots, cups and so on which are always of most elegant design based upon Etruscan and other models of antiquity’.⁸⁰ ⁷⁹ Young, English Porcelain, 181–5.

⁸⁰ Hillier, Pottery and Porcelain, 78.

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Glass and Chinaware Table 4.6. Prices of chinaware in John Willie’s Glass Workshop and Warehouse, 1809–1810 £ s. d. 4 doz black Dutch teapots (Hollins & Co.) 1 doz oval teapots black (Mare, J. & M.) 40 setts teas imaged 425 (Hollins) @ 6/- set 40 setts teas handld 425 (Hollins) @ 7/- set 96 setts teas 2nds (Hollins) @ 4s. set 20 sets of china handld (Wolfe, Thomas, Hamilton & Co.) 6 doz gold lustre jugs (Bourne, Edward) @ 18/- doz 72 willow dishes 14≤ (Keeling, James) 22 doz blue teas flower (Lindop & Taylor) @ 5/6 per doz 20 doz blue teas cottage (Lindop & Taylor) @ 5/6 per doz 6 doz handld teas new landscape (Lindop & Taylor) @ 5/6 per doz 48 doz willow plates (Stevenson ( J&A) ) @ 4/12 pairs ewers & basins Grape (Stevenson & Godwin) @ 3/4 doz black Dutch teapots (24, 30) (Hollins) 6 doz pressed teapots (24) (Sheridan, J. H. & Hyatt) @ 21/-

2-8-0 1-15-0 12-0-0 14-0-0 19-4-0 0-15-0 5-8-0 5-8-5 6-1-0 5-10-0 1-13-0 9-12-0 1-16-0 2-8-0 6-6-0

Source: Ann Eatwell and Alex Werner, ‘A London Staffordshire Warehouse—1794–1825’, Journal of the Northern Ceramics Society, 8 (1991), 104–15.

Different types of china and earthenware were bought for different purposes, as expressed by Mrs Papendiek, assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to Queen Charlotte, when she wrote of setting up her first home in 1783: ‘Our tea and coffee set were of Common India china, our dinner service of earthenware, to which, for our rank, there was nothing superior, Chelsea porcelain and fine India china being only for the wealthy. Pewter and Delft ware could also be had, but were inferior.’⁸¹ The shifting value placed on china and earthenware is reflected in their display. In big houses during the early eighteenth century, the tea table was set with a tea service in main reception rooms. But by the early 1760s tea drinking had become so commonplace that the tea tables disappeared from the reception rooms at Petworth. Ornamental ware was also displayed on the walls—first oriental porcelain on gilt étagères and on rococo carved overmantels, and later Wedgwood vases on chimney pieces.⁸² Neil ⁸¹ Cited ibid. 81. ⁸² Anna Somers Cocks, ‘The Nonfunctional Use of Ceramics in the English Country House during the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in the History of Art, 25 (1989), 195–215.

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How it was Made

Fig. 4.7. Jonathan Tyers and family, 1740. Francis Hayman. National Portrait Gallery.

McKendrick overstates the claims to Wedgwood’s marketing genius by finding accounts and orders for his ware reaching down the social scale and across the globe. Wedgwood’s market was the market for British chinaware more generally, produced by myriad small Staffordshire producers, luxury porcelain works, large- and small-scale potteries in Liverpool, Leeds, and Newcastle. McKendrick, nevertheless, expresses the sentiments that drove the market for this new modern luxury good. It is . . . in the fading lists of outstanding accounts and amongst the neglected bundles of everyday orders that the true picture of Wedgwood’s universal appeal and widespread success is to be found. They record ambitions of the chef of the Yacht Inn in Cheshire who hoped to found his gastronomic reputation on Wedgwood’s creamware; the taste for Wedgwood shared by a German professor at Brunswick and a bachelor don at Cambridge; the popularity of Wedgwood in a lonely military garrison in Quebec; and the purchase of Wedgwood by Edward Gibbon whilst writing his great history in Lausanne . . .⁸³ ⁸³ McKendrick, ‘Commercialization of the Potteries’, 140.

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Glass and Chinaware Chinaware and its earthenware imitations remained inextricably linked with fine metalwares. We have seen in the previous chapter how both were produced in imitation of different types of silver. Luxury porcelain was frequently decorated with gilded stands or handles to emphasize further its luxury status. The shift from rococo to neoclassical tastes supposedly went with a new dissociation of luxury with gold. Wedgwood wrote that in Ireland,‘the same noble contempt for Gold reigns . . . they cannot bear anything Gilt beyond a picture frame . . . What will this world come to! Gold, the most precious of all metals is absolutely kicked out of doors, & our poor Gilders I believe must follow it.’⁸⁴ His object in his vasemaking was one of ‘greatly reducing, if not totally banishing this offensive gilding’. ‘I do not find it an easy matter to make a Vase with the colouring so natural, varied, pleasing & un-pot-like, & the shape so delicate, as to make it seem worth a great deal of money, without the additional trappings of handles, ornaments, & gilding.’⁸⁵ Wedgwood’s own black basalt ware was made in imitation of Greek and Etruscan black earthenware. This, in its turn, was an imitation of patina silver. But Wedgwood’s own black basalt, and the many copies of this, came to be used as a direct substitute for silver teaware.Tea sets made of porcelain or earthenware were matched in wealthier households with silver teapots, jugs, and sugar bowls. By the end of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century, there were new preferences for ‘Egyptian black’ or black basalt teapots. As a visitor to England in 1807 wrote, ‘at breakfast, tea was made in a vessel of silver, or of fine black porcelain’. Black china or porcelain at the time was the term used for black basalt.⁸⁶ The porcelain and earthenwares that imitated silver, metals, marbles, and precious stones were but a reflection of the ingenuity and transmutation of metal ornament. ⁸⁴ Wedgwood to Bentley, 7 Mar. 1772 (Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele). ⁸⁵ Wedgwood to Bentley, 18 Apr. 1772 (Wedgwood Papers, University of Keele). ⁸⁶ Eatwell and Werner, ‘A London Staffordshire Warehouse’, 97–9.

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5 Metal Things: Useful Devices and Agreeable Trinkets Their own steel and iron in such laborious hands, become equal to the gold and silver of the Indies. David Hume, ‘Of Commerce’ (1752)

Fantasies of Metal Herodotus wrote of the Persians during the Persian Wars of 480 bce that the troops included 2,000 spearmen with golden pomegranates on the butt-end of their spears, 1,000 spearmen with golden apples, and 9,000 with silver pomegranates. The Persians were said to ‘have everything, gold, silver, bronze, elaborately embroidered clothes and beasts of burden and slaves’. When they marched on Greece that year, they ‘were adorned with the greatest magnificence . . . [and] glittered all over with gold, vast quantities of which they wore about their persons’.¹ Luxury goods made in metals held an intrinsic symbolic and aesthetic appeal in ancient and early modern material cultures. Crafted in gold and silver, they were goods in precious metals, used otherwise as stores and measures of value. Displayed as worked silver plate or gold jewellery, they represented success, status, and hospitality; they displayed creditworthiness and reputation. The crown plate and jewels represented the political power of the nation; its goldsmiths’ shops piled high with plate conveyed the riches of the nation. Gifts crafted in gold and silver, and markers of rites of passage such as silver spoons given at christenings or gold mourning rings given at funerals, were suitable presents, binding families and communities in ways that exchanges of money could not.The crafting of gold and silver into ¹ Michael Vickers and David Gill, Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery (Oxford, 1996), 66.

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Metal Things vessels depended on the ability to make sheet metal, which spread from the urban craft centres of Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium bce. Those sheet metal techniques and their analogue in the casting technologies of Chinese bronzes of the Shang and Zhou dynasties (c.1700 bce–771 bce) had wide repercussions for the development of goods in other metals, but also for pottery and porcelain. Working in gold and silver found close parallels in the processing and working of a vital range of non-ferrous metals, lead, copper, tin, nickel, and zinc, and the key alloys based in these, bronze and brass.² While ornamental ware and coinage were founded in the workings of gold and silver, iron and steel formed the makings of armaments. Beside the prestige of the goldsmith ranked that of the armourers: forgers of swords and casters of cannon. The smith who was nailmaker and horseshoe maker, who made the tools of agriculture and those of building and manufacture, was, however, esteemed for his skill as an armourer. A material culture based in the processing and working of iron and the making of fine steel provided a powerful symbol of national authority. Adapting the making of arms to that of domestic utensils, material of building and transport, tools and machines, provided a depth of economic power. Richard Cobden in the nineteenth century was to hail the metal industries and the skilled workers of the eighteenth: ‘Our strength, wealth and commerce grew out of the skilled labour of the men working in metals. They are at the foundation of our manufacturing greatness.’³ Those who seek for explanations of British exceptionalism always emphasize an expertise in working in metals. Historians have investigated superior British versatility in iron processing, in adapting a wide range of industrial techniques to the use of metals, especially iron and steel. Metals, indeed, had become part of Britain’s defining industrial identity by the time of the Victorians. Samuel Smiles contrasted gold and iron: ‘In early times the products of skilled industry were for the most part luxuries intended for the few, whereas now the most exquisite tools and engines are employed in producing articles of ordinary consumption for the great mass of the community.’⁴ What was distinctive about British metal products? Certainly fine luxury products in gold and silver were not just coveted, but made, in most parts of the world, and individual states all built up their own arms industries—all ² Ibid. Mitchell (ed.), Goldsmiths, Silversmiths and Bankers. ³ Cited in Asa Briggs, ‘Metals and the Imagination’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 128 (1980), 665–70, p. 665. ⁴ Ibid.

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How it was Made fostered their metallurgical industries. The metal goods of everyday life from domestic utensils to ploughs, horseshoes, and nails made metal production a necessity. But specific regions in many countries excelled; they traded their processed metals or their crafted goods throughout their own countries, and beyond to trading partners. While highly esteemed luxuries in gold and silver may have led trade going back to the neolithic era, the trade in other metals was not far behind. The trade in precious metals also formed the basis of the system of international exchange since these acted as a convertible reserve of value. Bronze Age (c.2500–1200 bce) settlements in the eastern Mediterranean, then the Aegean, traded copper and tin, as well as craft metal goods and fine stone, over great distances.⁵ China, by the Song dynasty (960–1279 ce), produced 150,000 tons of iron annually, and indeed used iron in its coinage. Metal goods in gold, silver, copper, and iron sold to 134 destinations.⁶ South India produced cheap high-quality iron sufficient to its needs, and exported iron goods in the seventeenth century to Batavia.⁷ Sweden, Russia, the southern Netherlands around Liège, and the Basque region of Spain and France all produced both iron ore and iron products. Families of French ironworkers from the early sixteenth century onwards spread iron-forging methods in Britain and in Sweden. Copper was produced from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in central Europe, especially in Hungary, the Tyrol, and the Harz, and brass was manufactured in Aachen.⁸ Indeed Britain relied throughout the early modern period and much of the eighteenth century on high-grade iron and steel imported from Sweden and Russia. There was little that was special at this stage about Britain’s metal resources or its national metal-using skills. A shift in the significance of those skills coincided with the rapidly rising demands of the colonial trade, and with the growth of new domestic and European markets for small metal consumer goods.These were new objects in gold and silver, but, much more significantly, they were watches and instruments, and new light metal domestic ware and ornaments. Glass, porcelain, and earthenware, decorative and domestic ware became new fashionable goods. Their luxury attraction, as we have seen, lay in their ingenious imitations of crystal and silver. Metals were more adaptable to ⁵ Andrew and Susan Sherratt, ‘From Luxuries to Commodities: The Nature of Mediterranean Bronze Age Trading Systems’, in N. H. Gale (ed.), Bronze Age Trade in the Mediterranean ( Jonsered, 1991), 351–86, pp. 360–1, 366. ⁶ Deng, ‘A Critical Survey of Recent Research in Chinese Economic History’, 3; Deng, Chinese Maritime Activities, 116. ⁷ Prasannan Parthasarathi, ‘The Great Divergence’, Past and Present, 116 (2002), 275–93, p. 289. ⁸ Göran Rydèn, ‘Metallurgic Industry: Historical Overview’, Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, iii (Oxford, 2003), 490–3.

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Metal Things the invention of new products. What was made in gold and silver could be imitated in other metals. Small possessions might be fashioned with clever intricacy, and value derived from the making rather than from the materials. Consumer goods made in metals, especially of iron and steel, silver plate, and all kinds of alloys, became, over the course of the eighteenth century, characteristic British products. The consumer attraction of metal goods in the full range from tools, instruments, and small objects of utility through to high-quality jewellery tapped into the endless possibilities demanded by fashion markets. Birmingham polished steel buckles, and brass or enamelled buttons were international fashion necessities by the 1740s; false British identity marks were even stamped on pale imitations made in Paris as late as 1810.⁹ Adam Smith saw the enormity of this passion: landlords gave up their estates to gratify their passion for selfish possession of ‘a pair of diamond buckles’. Great proprietors ‘to gratify their childish vanity’ sold their land and relinquished their feudal privileges in return for ‘trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the play-things of children than the serious pursuits of men’. Ingenious mechanisms, springs and dials, little boxes of curious metals, finishes and designs and small attractive chains and tools fascinated their consumers. ‘What pleases these lovers of toys is not so much the utility, as the aptness of the machines which are fitted to promote it.’¹⁰ Imitation metals were particularly appealing in their novelty and ingenuity. Smith used the example of pinchbeck, the copper and zinc alloy; many regarded it, he argued, as virtually equal to gold in colour, and paste and glass jewellery were not far short of the brilliance of real gems; the English imitation, ‘French plate’, was close to the splendour of silver.¹¹ London’s new shopping streets in Piccadilly, St James’s, and Westminster were, by the mid-eighteenth century, displacing older shopping areas around Cheapside, Fleet Street, and the Strand, and surpassing even those in Holborn, Leicester Fields, and Covent Garden. Luxury shopping areas had haberdashers’ and mercers’ shops interspersed with many goldsmiths’ and jewellers’ shops alongside the toy shops and china shops. Decorative metalwares in silver, silver plate, precious stones, and combinations of alloys and glassware glittered from shop windows. London toy and goldsmiths shops were tourist attractions for Europe’s elites, and the city was also a major producer of toys and decorative metalwares. Even by the first third of ⁹ Harris, Industrial Espionage, 202. ¹⁰ Smith, Wealth of Nations, i. iii. 4, p. 419; Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, iv. i. 180. ¹¹ Smith, cited in De Marchi and Van Miergroet, ‘Ingenuity, Preference’, 392, 404.

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How it was Made the eighteenth century, makers of snuff boxes, watch cases, sword hilts, shoe buckles, and other small toys were to be found ‘in Lodgings, and . . . in Garrets, in the utmost Skirts of the Town; and by [them] some thousands of Families are maintained’.¹² Decorative metal goods were available in similar forms and products in many different types of metals; they might be owned not just by wealthy aristocrats, but by small tradesmen. For consumers they were things to display and items worth saving for. For their purchasers, they conveyed meanings of usefulness, civility, and ingenuity. Their producers spanned two worlds. They were located partly in the world of metropolitan luxuries— among the gold- and silversmiths, but they were also part of the provincial manufacturing regions—watch and clock part makers, fine tool and steel filemakers in the industrial villages of South Lancashire; they were the toymakers and japanners of Birmingham, and the cutlers and plated-ware makers of Sheffield. These goods might be small silver items bought as family keepsakes—cups, spoons, pepper castors, tea tongs, cream sauce pans, tankards, castors, ladles, and tumblers—and passed down to sons, daughters, nephews, and nieces. They were knives and forks, plated candlesticks or tea urns, steel buckles and enamelled buttons, or brass furniture fittings and small stove ware. These products were often sold together with china and glass, and sometimes with perfumes. They fitted the patterns of new consumer fashions. Medallions, buttons and buckles, ornamental boxes, jewellery, candelabra, small furnishings made in brass, light metal alloys, ormolu, and japanned ware complemented the china tea sets, embroidered linen and lace, mahogany and cane furniture which were now appearing as ‘best ware’ in the homes of middling-class tradesmen. The toymakers attached themselves to the fashion trades. ‘For the London season the Spitalfields silkweavers produced each year their new designs, and the Birmingham toymakers their buttons, buckles, patch boxes, snuff boxes, chatelaines, watches, watch seals, necklaces, earrings, hair combs and other jewellery.’¹³

Birmingham Birmingham occupied a centrepoint of these trades by the 1730s.Not close to sources of iron and coal like other Black Country towns, and far from easy ¹² Cited in Helen Clifford, Silver in London: The Parker and Wakelin Partnership 1760–76 (New Haven, 2004), ch. 4, p. 63. ¹³ Eric Robinson, ‘Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood, Apostles of Fashion’, in R. P. T. Davenport-Hines and Jonathan Liebenau (eds.), Business in the Age of Reason (London, 1987), 98–114.

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Metal Things water transport until the Birmingham canal in the early 1770s, it deployed its skilled workforce on small objects of value or fashion. Large numbers of its workers were skilled in the brass and copper trades, with over 6,500 families concentrating on manufacturing brass into finished goods. A core base of metalworking skills and techniques was honed and adapted across a range of new commodities; metalworking and engineering expertise were directed to the production of desirable consumer goods.The tools, machines, and materials associated with the production of the goods were equally inventive, modern, and fashionable. The Birmingham manufacturers saw themselves as producing luxuries and superfluities as well as engines and machines. If we had no Nobility, Gentry, or Rich people, who would consume the Manufactures of Birmingham? Our Manufactures are principally Luxuries or Superfluities: and if we mind our own interest, we should be among the last to injure or chase away the Consumers of them.¹⁴

Matthew Boulton and his patron, the wealthy mine owner Elizabeth Montagu, celebrated improvement and luxury. Boulton wrote to her, ‘You are not only an encourager and defender of the Arts but a parent and nursing mother of them, for you raise from the regions of Erebus the sooty ore, the parent of all iron work which is the foundation of Arts.’ In a subsequent letter Montagu commended Boulton’s improving steam engines and silver ornament. ‘I shall owe to you the richest and most beautiful of my Furniture and by a Fire Engine of your construction shall in time save money equivalent to the expense of these articles of elegant luxury.’¹⁵ Boulton’s patron provided a good connection with members of the aristocracy, and he cultivated visits from foreign dignitaries. These connections provided access to models for his own products, and elite markets for his luxury lines in silver, silver plate, ormolu, cut steel buckles, jewellery, and medallions. He made commemorative issues for royal birthdays, produced show pieces for foreign royalty, such as Catherine the Great, and produced the copies and variations on patterns in cheaper format and materials for the middling classes. As Eric Robinson has argued, the ‘gradations of society were codified in a whole protocol of shoebuckles. They were made in every size and every material from diamonds to paste, from gold to pinchbeck, and Boulton sold to all levels of society and to both men and women.’¹⁶ ¹⁴ Address to the Inhabitants of Birmingham from a Friend to Birmingham and the Constitution, 29 Apr. 1793, 325311, City Archives, Birmingham Central Library. ¹⁵ Matthew Boulton to Elizabeth Montagu, 16 Jan. 1772; Elizabeth Montagu to Matthew Boulton, 1 Oct. 1778 (Matthew Boulton Papers, 330, City Archives, Birmingham Central Library). ¹⁶ Robinson, ‘Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood’, 109.

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How it was Made

Fig. 5.1. Portrait of Matthew Boulton. Von Breda. Science & Society Picture Library.

The small producer, James Bisset, depicted Birmingham’s consumer products as a part of the world of the arts; her luxury and semi-luxury commodities brought together technology and the fine arts. The Birmingham products were the new curiosities; they drew on new technologies, new chemical principles, and modern manufactories, but they also incorporated design principles which awakened the memory of a classical inheritance. Bisset reconstructed his own life story in this framework as inventor, experimenter, and design leader. He was trained in drawing, literate and widely read, but ‘sought to be initiated in the different mysteries of the various arts then practised in that improving and wonderful place and the neighbouring Soho’. He took his apprenticeship in the painting rooms of Bellamy’s japanning factory, but then spent some years in highly subdivided factory work ~ 160 ~

Metal Things ‘painting upwards of twenty gross of snuff boxes in a week with roses, anemones and various coloured flowers with three tints to every flower and three to every leaf ’. He escaped his tedious daily stint by inventing a process of ornamenting on glass, and setting up his own workshop where he varied his products as tastes changed, first ornamenting coat buttons, moving on to making glass-painted pictures, then shifting again to political and royal medallions and finally to dealing in pictures.¹⁷ He produced a guidebook to the town and its manufactories, The Magnificent Directory; this was written in verse and illustrated by large numbers of expensive engravings. His verse praised Birmingham invention: From Articles minute, to pond’rous ores The royal patent, here, is found in scores; Huge Engines, I have seen, with ease, compress Three truss of hay, in half a span, nay less; With patent wheels, which malt so quickly mashes, Spring latchets for the shoes, and patent sashes, . . . Grand warlike weapons, various works of art, machee of paper, and the Patent Cart . . . And to detect Base Coin, the Patent test.

His couplets linked the useful and the agreeable, inventions of art and of war. Bisset’s engraving of the brass-founders, which became a trade card for nine different brass-founders in the town, depicted a classically designed and planned ‘royal or modern manufactory’, but with chimneys, smoke, medley of buildings, piles of coal, and engines. He represented Birmingham manufactures as modern industry with a classical façade. He depicted the tools of the trade as carefully as the Birmingham commodities; engravings of engineering works were juxtaposed with those of artists and japanners. These new consumer objects were conveyed as products of enlightened industry; they were novelties which looked like craft goods, but were produced by means of the latest technologies.¹⁸ Birmingham’s contributions to the new profusion of metal products were complemented by Sheffield’s development of a silver-plate trade. Thomas Boulsover’s invention of Sheffield plate in 1742—goods made in copper fused between thin layers of silver—was immediately applied to the ¹⁷ Memoir of James Bisset (1818), Warwick County Record Office, CR1526/246. Parts of this memoir are reprinted in Memoir of James Bisset, ed. Dudley. ¹⁸ James Bisset, A Poetic Survey round Birmingham; With a Brief Description of the Different Curiosities and Manufactories of the Place. Intended as a Guide to Strangers. Accompanied by a Magnificent Directory (Birmingham, 1799), Birmingham Central Library and Warwick County Record Office.

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How it was Made manufacture of buttons, tea urns, coffee pots, saucepans, tankards, and candlesticks, then to the whole range of dishes, jugs, spoons, and forks. Silver workers were gathered from London, York, Newcastle, and Birmingham, and a luxury manufacture rapidly built up on ornamental silver plate and silverware alongside the staple cutlery and steel products.

Products and Consumer Goods Ornament and fashion came to dominate demand for luxury silverware in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. London goldsmiths seeking visual novelty and fashion looked to designs from France, and also introduced new product ranges including tea equipages, tureens and cruets, and matching sets of articles, as well as small items from snuff boxes and locks to orange strainers and bottle tickets.¹⁹ Goods were controlled through the Goldsmiths Hall statutes, and through the Assay Offices which marked goods’ gold and silver content, ensuring quality. These offices were to be found by 1700 not just in London, but in York, Exeter, Bristol, Chester, and Norwich, and soon after in Newcastle upon Tyne, and from 1773 in Birmingham and Sheffield. Manufacturers diversified their output; they made new products; new goods were made in thin rolled sheet silver which was exempted from hallmarking regulations; the exemptions extended from the end of the 1730s, and applied to much of the jewellery they made. With controls de-centred, regional production gathered pace. Silver, as Helen Clifford shows, was also readily recycled as consumers chose fashion over intrinsic value: damaged or oldfashioned plate was melted down to create new things. Elaborately ornamented rococo silver was introduced from France, and silversmiths, engravers, and modellers soon spread designs throughout the luxury trades.²⁰ Tableware penetrated middling-class usage rapidly and deeply. Family sociability, as Weatherill sensitively conveyed, centred on eating at table, with customs and manners internalized and passed down. When elites took up new French manners in eating, abduring contact between hands and food, the middling-classes adopted the new practices. Forks were added to knives and spoons. By the first quarter of the eighteenth century, most of those aspiring to middling-class status and artisan respectability bought their knives, forks, and spoons in sets; retailers sold these in dozens in a ¹⁹ Styles, ‘Goldsmiths and the London Luxury Trades’, 118–19. ²⁰ Clifford, ‘A Commerce with Things’.

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Metal Things fitted canteen or box. They provided such tableware, not just in expensive decorative forms, but in a heavy utilitarian style to be bought as necessary decencies alongside basic pottery, pots and pans in iron, copper, and brass, pieces of pewter and linen.²¹ Silver teaware became a mark of gentility and civility among the upper and middling classes; possibilities proliferated for new consumer products—not just teapots and kettles, but cream boats and milk jugs, spoons, sugar tongs and basins, or even tea urns and whole matching equipages. These might be made or provided by London gold- and silversmiths, but by the mid-eighteenth century they were just as likely to be made from silver plate, and produced in Birmingham or Sheffield. London silversmiths displayed their silver plate beside their silver—it was the designing and fashioning, as well as the novelty wares, rather than the value of the silver in any article that attracted the consumer.²² Gleaming silver-plated teaware complemented porcelain teacups and teapots on new fashion mahogany tea tables. Early silver teapots were made in the style of already established large tankard-style coffee pots, or alternatively as imitations of Chinese porcelain teapots from the later 1660s. Though made of a highly conductive metal, with wooden handles, a silver teapot was made of an established prestige material, and connected the drinking of an exotic beverage with an elite market and the cultural practices of gentility.²³ With the silver teapot there were silver canisters, cream boats and milk jugs, silver teaspoons, strainers, and sugar tongs. Elite customers adding to family and institutional heirlooms were now diverted by ornament. All manner of small superfluous objects, many endowed with a polite ‘use’, enticed genteel and middling-class purchasers. Silver plate was worked with new rolling mills and die stamps, and the new products were quickly identified with stamped ware—candlesticks made from stamped components combined in various ways to make a large number of models and a wide range of tablewares was possible by the 1750s. By the later eighteenth century anything was possible. The Sheffield manufacturers, Fenton, Creswick & Company, declared in 1794 that ‘there are none in the Plated line we do not Manufacture’.²⁴ By the 1760s and 1770s there were tea fountains followed by tea urns, most popularly made in silver ²¹ H. R. Singleton, A Chronology of Cutlery (Sheffield, 1970), 2–3; David Hey, The Rural Metalworkers of the Sheffield Region (Leicester, 1972), 50–1. ²² This section on silver draws on Clifford, ‘A Commerce with Things’, 161–2, 164–5. ²³ John Styles, ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past and Present, 168 (2000), 124–69, pp. 144–7. ²⁴ Helen Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention, Identity and Imitation in the London and Provincial Metal-Working Trades, 1750–1800’, Journal of Design History, 12 (1999), 241–56, pp. 243, 250.

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How it was Made

Fig. 5.2. Designs for candlesticks. Boulton Papers, City Archives, Birmingham Central Library.

plate. The tea urn became an icon of the eighteenth century; it was an urnshaped kettle with a tap close to the base instead of a spout, first charcoalheated, and after 1774 with a patented box iron. Silver-plated tea equipages centred around a tea urn led novelty and fashion by the later eighteenth century. Birmingham’s entrepreneurs quickly capitalized on Sheffield’s initiative. Matthew Boulton in particular extended into silver plating and silversmithing from the early 1760s. His state-of-the-art stamping and rolling technology gathered under one roof brought together design, invention, ~ 164 ~

Metal Things

Fig. 5.3. Designs for tea urns. Boulton Papers, City Archives, Birmingham Central Library.

materials, and skills for rapid product development and turnover. Even so, Boulton was too interested in his luxury clients and silversmithing, and ignored his partner Fothergill’s misgivings expressed in a series of increasingly anxious dispatches from Soho to London in the early 1770s: I am pretty certain that had our attention been solely on the current articles of trade, our reputation would have been on a far more promising foundation . . . I believe our gilt Button trade will be best of all our undertakings, as our Buttons in appearance far surpass any I have ever seen . . .

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How it was Made Our steel chain trade languishes much for want of new patterns etc. as likewise our Buckle trade in general, Tortoise and Gilt Boxes, Gilt Chains and indeed most of our current articles must have some of your attention when you return. I am sorry you mention getting up specimens of elegant Plate to exhibit at Soho this summer, when our capital is insufficient to carry on our current Button business.²⁵

Silver and silver-plated goods made in Birmingham and Sheffield joined fashion consumer goods made in brass, copper, and steel. The toys, buttons, buckles, and locks, the candlesticks, the furniture, carriage and harness fittings, and ornaments and jewellery of all kinds, might be plated or made in silver, or gilted or made in yet other new alloys and materials from ormolu and tutania to pinchbeck. Articles could be cast, stamped, or made of rolled or fused metal; they might be made of mixed media, glass and ormolu, or cut steel and ceramic. The materials and techniques made possible an imaginative leap in the range of products that might be invented. The traditional goods of the London gold- and silversmiths were left behind. However much commentators might condemn Birmingham and Sheffield ware for its low quality, or for its use of base metals, it was design, price, and novelty that won the day. Thin-gauge silver was easier to shape into new forms and to decorate; heavy-cast and raised silver might easily be imitated in silver plate. The London gold- and silversmiths who tried to stop the foundation of the Birmingham and Sheffield Assay Offices in 1773 accused their manufacturers of fraud, claiming that several persons in these towns had ‘of late years, not only plated or covered with silver, many wares and manufactures made of base metal; but some of them had even marked the same with marks resembling those appointed for real silver plate’.²⁶ Richard Morton, a Sheffield silversmith, responded with the consumer’s point of view when he reported: he had seen plated work of almost every pattern that was made in Silver, and so well imitated that he has been obliged to file the Coat of Silver off before he could distinguish the difference, and his customers have declared they could not discover the Difference between Plated and Silver Work if he has not mentioned it.²⁷

Many younger and middling-class consumers preferred the Birmingham and Sheffield products, not just because they were cheaper, but because they ²⁵ Fothergill to Matthew Boulton, 30 Mar. 1771, 22 Apr. 1771, 24 Feb. 1773 (Matthew Boulton Papers, 307). Also see Ken Quickenden, ‘Boulton and Fothergill Silver: Business Plans and Miscalculations’, Art History, 3 (Sept. 1980), 274–92. ²⁶ Arthur Ryland, ‘The Birmingham Assay Office’, in Samuel Timmins (ed.), The Resources, Products and Industrial History of Birmingham and the Midland Hardware District (Birmingham, 1866), 499–510. ²⁷ Clifford, ‘A Commerce with Things’, 164.

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Metal Things were more fashionable, their imitations were ingenious, and customers were intrigued by the proliferation and variety of goods now on offer. Many of the goods conveyed their luxury status in small amounts of gold and silver, but minuscule amounts yielded sought-after fashion items. The gold manufactured into 20 shillings’ worth of seals was said to be valued at little more than 2d.; that in a snuff box priced by its maker at 18s. was not worth 11/2d. In Sheffield in a dozen knives which sold for 6s., the silver in the ornamentation was not worth 3d. Elegance and design counted for far more than the value of materials.²⁸ The key to the success of the new British toys was the innovative working of copper, brass, and steel. The silver plate put a veneer on things made in these base metals; much more expensive silverware might just as easily ‘imitate’ the ‘base’ achievement. Brass-founding in Birmingham was already a highly specialized byproduct by the middle of the century: there were specialist candlestick makers, then buckle and button makers; there was cabinet brass-foundry, carriage and harness brass-foundry. By 1785 there were pocket-book lock makers, curtain-ring makers, brass nutcracker makers, stud makers, metal swivel makers, hat-pin makers, brass chape makers, brass nail makers, and wood and bed screw makers.The stamped brass-foundry trade transformed sheet metal into virtually any shape, and from 1770 with John Taylor’s patent, copper buttons, buckles, snuff boxes, and all manner of other articles might be silver plated as well. The leading consumer articles that marked out really new departures were Birmingham buckles and buttons. Birmingham’s steel buckles were unsurpassed. Made from cementation or ‘blister’ steel from early in the eighteenth century, they could be highly polished and faceted, and the fashion for buckles quickly became a fashion for a modern English product. Matthew Boulton made the case for the buckle’s significance in a statement to a House of Commons Committee for a bill to prohibit the export of buckle-chapes. The chape was the tongue or part of the buckle by which it was fastened to a strap or ribbon. Boulton spoke of 8,000 employed in the trade in Warwick and Stafford, and stated that buckles were composed of copper, brass, iron, tin, or spelter, and large numbers were set with glass in imitation of jewellery. There was a big export trade, and Boulton set out the reasons for the British domination of international markets. That here are Secrets in the Buckle Trade, which Foreigners are Strangers to, which induces him to think that Buckles cannot be made abroad so well as in England . . . ²⁸ Journals of the House of Commons, 32 Geo. II, 20 Mar. 1759, xxviii. 496–7.

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How it was Made

Fig. 5.4. Buckles: large George III Irish Oval Shoe Buckles. Dublin c.1780. large George III Provincial Shoe Buckles, c.1790. Bonham’s, New Bond Street. Sale Catalogue 18 July 2002.

They cannot make Chapes in Spain and Portugal so good and cheap as in England, as they have no slitting or rolling Mills; and if they were to import Iron there, it would be of too high a Price for the Manufacture; and they have neither Workmen nor Coals:That the Germans can make Chapes; but they take a great quantity of us, as their Iron is not so fit for Chapes . . .²⁹

Organization and Workforce Behind the rapid proliferation of new products in steel, brass, copper, and a variety of alloys, as well as in gold, silver, and plated ware, lay a transformation in production processes—in organization as well as in technologies. While some metal goods were still the products of a specialist luxury craft industry, most were part of the making of a new large consumer industry. It was no longer possible in the eighteenth century to isolate goldsmiths. Certainly they dealt in gold and silver, but they also made and sold a range of plated ware and a wide range of metal toys. They were broadly connected with the hardware trades; London producers engaged in extensive dealings with those of Sheffield, Birmingham, and Lancashire for materials and parts. Most luxury products made by any one London goldsmith were the result of parts from many firms and the product of many hands; subcontracting was the rule rather than the exception. The London goldsmiths’ industrial organization was on a continuum not so distinct from that of the putting-out of tool and watch parts in the dense villages of south ²⁹ H. W. Dickinson, Matthew Boulton (Cambridge, 1936), 32–3.

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Metal Things Lancashire, or the divisions between the rural forges, and the grinders and hafters of the higher-class Sheffield cutlery trades. The highly specialized processes in some of the larger Birmingham toy factories might be effectively duplicated in her districts dense with producers of differentiated and complementary goods, pieces, and parts. Boulton’s Soho Works or John Taylor’s toy works produced a whole range of luxury, semi-luxury, and consumer ware; there was rapid cross-fertilization of designs, and versatile adaptation to diverse materials and products. But equally a luxury London goldsmith or fine clock and watchmaker such as Benjamin Vulliamy at the end of the eighteenth century advertised ornamental plate, silver, ornamental work in metal, and the sale of diamonds and pearls. ‘They were prepared to supply their customers with anything from a chimney-piece to a door handle, from a piano to a button.’ Few of these items, even the clocks, were produced by Vulliamy, but instead were subcontracted out and divided up. The Vulliamy order book for silver indicates the complexities of the subcontracting involved in the production of any single item. A pair of terrines and stands made for one individual involved sending various parts of the work out to eleven different craftspeople, several of whom completed various jobs at different stages of the production process. Each job was separately priced, and the item was costed accordingly.³⁰ The luxury goods manufacturers of big cities like London subcontracted their work; this was a rational response to periodic needs for specialist work, and to conditions of credit. Subcontracting gave access to specialisms not sufficiently needed to justify full-time employment of a journeyman.Taking this to its logical conclusion, masters could limit their own manufacturing activities or become pure retailers. Luxury retailers were forced to give long credit to wealthy customers who were poor at paying; if employing journeymen, retailers had to meet wages bills on a weekly basis. Subcontracting was a solution—piecework put out could be contracted on credit.³¹ This subcontracting was turned to highly subdivided labour either between workshops or between departments of a single factory. Even within the workshops producing steel toys in eighteenth-century Birmingham it ³⁰ See G. de Bellaigue, ‘The Vulliamys and France’, Furniture History, 3 (1967), 45–53; also see Public Record Office, Chancery Masters Exhibits, C. 104/58 Part 1, Vulliamy (Order Book for Silver) and Vulliamy (Beckford as a Client). Both sets of papers indicate extensive networks of subcontracting in the manufacture of high-luxury goods. ³¹ Andrew Federer, ‘Payment, Credit and the Organization of Work in Eighteenth-Century Westminster’, unpublished paper, SSRC Conference on Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory, Oxford, 1980; Styles, ‘Goldsmiths and the London Luxury Trades’, 114–16.

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How it was Made was ‘very rare to find in any of these workshops a worker who can make a complete article, even for example a [steel] watch chain’. In the replication of any single product, in the making of a tool, and in the making of steel itself, a team of interdependent craftsmen had to be assembled.³² Contrary to traditional assumptions both about manufacture in the luxury trades and about the metal trades in Birmingham and Sheffield, many of the firms were large, and factory production was well established several decades before the rise of the cotton factory. A number of London goldsmiths were considerable enterprises which also ran extensive subcontracting networks. Campbell in 1747 wrote: ‘the Goldsmith employs several distinct workmen, almost as many as there are different Articles in his Shop; for in this great City there are Hands that excel in every Branch, and are constantly employed but in that one of which they are Masters.’³³ Parker and Wakelin, one London goldsmith’s firm, operated a network of seventyfive subcontractors between 1765 and 1770.³⁴ London hardwaremen and ironmongers ranked among the largest of London’s retail trades: in the 1770s half of these insured their businesses at rates between £100 and £500, and one in five was insured for more than £1,000. One such large firm was Townsend & Crossley of 3 Gracechurch Street, who insured their stock, utensils, and goods for £9,000 in 1770.³⁵ Many of these London firms were either retail enterprises or large producers relying on putting-out for production. Large factories had become a distinctive feature of the Birmingham brass and toy trades by the 1760s. Where London luxury producers might be severely constrained in any ambitions to centralize by conditions of credit, this was not such a pressing concern in the new Birmingham hardware and toy trades. For these were producing semiluxury ware or consumer goods where cash payment or very short-term credit only prevailed. Where some departments of a factory, such as Boulton’s silver department, or some international marketing might rely on long credit, these could be supported by other high-turnover consumer lines within the factory. Matthew Boulton employed over 600 workers at his new Soho factory soon after it was built in 1766. He developed specialist teams under heads of department, luring away silversmiths, chasers, braziers, and coppersmiths from other masters in Birmingham, Sheffield, and London.The factory was of a pretentious size, and cost five times the sum predicted, £10,000 instead of £2,000. But factories as such, even of a substantial size, were no new ³² Harris, Industrial Espionage, 211, 219–21. ³³ Cited in Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention’, 246. ³⁴ Ibid. ³⁵ Barnett, London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution, 164–5.

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Metal Things departure. Alcock and Kempson’s Birmingham toy works in the 1740s and 1750s had an international reputation as a ‘big and famous manufactory’ with 300 to 400 workers in a works forming three sides of a square. Elliott & Sons of Frederick Street employed several hundred women in the three-floor building.³⁶ These factories contained machine tools of great variety—lathes, drop-presses, fly-presses, rolls, boring, piercing, and slotting machines. James Bisset was not fantasizing when his Magnificent Directory led visitors through metallurgical and mechanical wonders: In birmingham alone,—amaz’d they stood . . . Saw marcasites dissolve in liquid streams, And stubborn ores expand, and smelting, flow By strength of Calefaction, from below . . . The different button-works, they next review . . . The various ores they saw rich hues impart, Assuming different shapes, by skilful art; . . . The process of the gilding look’d well o’er, Yet scarce could tell rich gilt from semilore; Each stamp, each lathe, and press they careful scann’d Then went to see the paper trays japann’d.³⁷

This consumer metalwares manufacture was a highly sophisticated manufacturing economy. Its organizational structure was geared to highvolume production, flexibility, and rapid responsiveness to fashion change. It was not craft based and small scale, but highly capitalized and cosmopolitan. Its materials were sourced from the rest of Europe as well as from the Caribbean and Asia. It drew on European and other British labour forces and was connected through national subcontracting networks. While many have celebrated the dynamism of the industrial region, this regional analysis alone misconstrues the organization of these consumer industries. For they were by no means self-enclosed. The manufacturers were networked over the whole country, drawing in specialist labour or technologies as needed, and sending goods out to be to added to or finished. Matthew Boulton, for one, put out work to George Howlett, the Coventry watch- and clockmaker, and to Thomas Bradbury, the Sheffield plate manufacturer. Success depended on a constantly updated bank of knowledge of national and international expertise. Labour in these industries was scarce. Early skilled workforces came from abroad, from minority religious communities, and sometimes both. In the case of the London goldsmiths they were Huguenot and French; in the case ³⁶ Harris, Industrial Espionage, 174.

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³⁷ Bisset, Magnificent Directory.

How it was Made of Birmingham and Sheffield they were English dissenters. Establishing a new silver plate and silver manufacture in Sheffield, then Birmingham, meant importing skilled workers from London, York, and Newcastle. Boulton was still importing French workers for his silver manufacture in the early 1770s: I daily perceive the frenchmen in general are a heavy charge on the Manufactory: last Saturday a week’s work was brought in by one of them who charges 25 shillings per week, which might have been executed by Turner in this town for 5 shillings, but I would not like to despatch any of them without your concurrence.³⁸

Manufacturers frequently blamed their delays in dispatching orders on shortages of key workers. Such delays ranged from completing Mrs Montagu’s order for a tea vase to supplying a Spanish merchant with an order for steel buttons, delayed because ‘good steel workers are in the army, and it will take six months to complete the order’.³⁹ Key workers were constantly poached from other firms. In one dispute with another celebrated toy manufacturer, John Taylor, Boulton accused Taylor and his agent of enticing away three of his articled servants, and admitted that in retaliation he had lured away one of Taylor’s workers. Boulton hoped that they had balanced accounts, and could then ‘proceed hereafter on more gentleman like plans . . . than the shabby custom of secretly seducing each other’s servants’.⁴⁰ But equally skills were quickly built up through adaptation of knowledge from complementary trades, by subcontracting specific jobs across specialized toy, jewellery, and instrument makers, glass-cutters and japanners, and in some cases by taking over competing firms, absorbing their workforces.⁴¹ In Sheffield, silversmithing in the 1740s was only a sideline of a small number of knife handle makers; thirty years later in 1773 the 468 involved in the plated and stamped silver trades greatly exceeded the 300 goldsmiths, haftmakers, platemakers, and associated tradespeople reported working in London. In Sheffield the trade depended on ‘the Genius and Talent of a variety of skillful Artisans [including] Designers, Modellers, Die-Sinkers, Chasers and Engravers, Gilders, Silversmiths and Copper Braziers’, as well as ‘spinners, stampers, pierce workers, mounters, cleaners and polishers’. ³⁸ Fothergill to Matthew Boulton, 22 Apr. 1771 (Matthew Boulton Papers 307). ³⁹ Boulton to Mrs Montagu, 31 Oct. 1771 to 23 Jan. 1773 (Matthew Boulton Papers 330); Boulton to Don Manuel de Torres, 20 Apr. 1800 (Matthew Boulton DBF, T1/245). ⁴⁰ Matthew Boulton to John Taylor, 23 July 1769 (Matthew Boulton Papers, Letter Book D, 1768–1773, no. 136). ⁴¹ Francis Butcher to Matthew Boulton, Sept. 1769, Nov. 1788 (Matthew Boulton Papers, B6/83, 84); Boulton to J. H. Ebbinghaus, 1767 (Matthew Boulton Papers, E/28A; E1/30B).

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Metal Things Manufacturers and workers frequently worked with more than one firm, circulating parts, designs, and dies.⁴² Workforces in a rapidly expanding new consumer goods sector were made, as in other early factory industries, out of women, children, and parish apprentices. Matthew Boulton rarely took indentured apprentices, preferring to choose his own parish apprentices; John Taylor employed a preponderance of women among his 500 employees, none of whom had served a formal apprenticeship. Scarcity and flexibility were reflected in wages. Among the London gold- and silversmiths, wages can be estimated only from either apprentices’ premiums or bills submitted for independent work. Goldsmiths’ premiums ranged from £20 to £50 in the middle of the century, and ranked with those of mathematical instrument makers, upholders, and distillers. Unskilled wages ranged between £5 and £10 per year, but bills for independent work submitted by two skilled workers in the late 1740s ranged between £40 and £50 every six months.⁴³ Wages for Birmingham and Sheffield skilled workers varied with the orders, by week, season, and fashion, and were frequently piece-rates, so that only limited estimates of weekly wages are available.⁴⁴

Materials, Technology, and Invention Factories and an intense concentration of producers of diverse novelty and fashion goods attracted domestic and foreign tourists to Birmingham. The town rapidly gained a reputation for modern exercises in the division of labour and a close interaction between subcontracted and concentrated production processes. This was the place to come to see new products produced with machinery, the division of labour, and in some cases new showcase factories such as Boulton’s Soho. Factory tours were on the itinerary of many enlightened continental visitors as well as the English gentry and aristocracy. Lord Shelburne’s report on the Birmingham hardware manufactures in 1766 emphasized metals, machinery, and especially the division of labour: Its great rise was owing to two things, first the discovery of mixed metal so mollient or ductile as easily to suffer stamping, the consequence of which is they do buttons, ⁴² Clifford, Silver in London, ch. 3, pp. 65–8. ⁴³ Ibid., pp. 30, 33, 37. ⁴⁴ For wages see Henry Hamilton, The English Brass and Copper Industries to 1800 (London, 1926); Dickinson, Matthew Boulton, 32; D. C. Eversley, ‘Industry and Trade 1500–1800’, Victoria County History of Warwickshire (London, 1964), vii. 81–139, p. 110; Robert Leader, Sheffield in the Eighteenth Century (Sheffield, 1905), 3; G. I. H. Lloyd, The Cutlery Trades (London, 1913), 168–9.

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How it was Made Table 5.1. Wages of Birmingham and Sheffield metalworkers Birmingham

Brass work

Button trades

Buckle trades

1759–69 men 1759–69 boys 1759–69 women 1759–69 girls 1795 1800 men 1800 women 1800 children

7s.–£3/wk 1s.–7s./wk 7s.–42s./wk 1s.–4s./wk 15s./wk — — —

— — — — — 25–30s./wk 7s./wk 1s. 4d.–4s. 6d./wk

20s./wk(chapemakers) 9–15s./wk (filers) — — — — — —

Sheffield

Cutler

Grinder

1764 1769

12s./wk 9–20s./wk

— 18–20s./wk

Sources: Henry Hamilton, The English Brass and Copper Industries; H. W. Dickinson, Matthew Boulton (Cambridge, 1937), 32; D. C. Eversley, ‘Industry and Trade 1500–1800’, Victoria County History of Warwickshire, vii (London, 1965), 110; Leader, Sheffield in the Eighteenth Century, 3; G. I. H. Lloyd, The Cutlery Trades (London, 1913), 168–9.

buckles, toys and everything in the hardware way by stamping machines which were before obliged to be performed by human labour. Another thing quickly followed, instead of employing the same hand to finish a button or any other thing they subdivided it into as many different hands as possible.⁴⁵

Lady Shelburne experienced the factory tours as shopping trips: she described two days touring Taylor’s toy works, Boulton’s Soho, Gimlett’s and Baskerville’s japanning works. At Boulton’s she ‘purchased some watch chains and trinkets at an amazing cheap price and drank tea afterwards in his house’. The next day she went to Gimlett’s and bought ‘a great many toys and saw his warehouse of watches etc.’ She visited the toyshops and at Taylor’s she saw a box enamelled with a landscape and was given it as a souvenir: watching its production was part of the attraction of the product. a stamping instrument managed only by one woman first impresses the picture on paper, which paper is then laid even upon a piece of white enamel and rubbed hard with a knife or instrument like it, till it is marked upon the box.Then there is spread ⁴⁵ Lord Fitzmaurice, Life of William Earl of Shelburne, 2 vols. (London, 1912), ii. 404.

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Metal Things over it with a brush some metallic colour reduced to a fine powder which adheres to the moist part and by putting it afterwards into an oven over a few minutes the whole is completed by fixing the colour.⁴⁶

Boulton wrote in 1767 of the stream of foreign dignitaries visiting the factory: I had lords and ladies to wait on yesterday; I have French and Spaniards today; and tomorrow I shall have Germans, Russians and Norwegians . . . Last week we had Prince Poniatowski, nephew of the King of Poland, and the French, Danish, Sardinian and Dutch ambassadors; this week we have had Count Orloff and the five celebrated brothers who are such favourites with the Empress of Russia; and only yesterday I had the Viceroy of Ireland who dined with me. Scarcely a day passes without a visit from some distinguished personage.⁴⁷

The showcase factories were a tourist attraction, but most knew that the key to the success of the new decorative goods was the materials they were made of and the machines that made replication and interchangeability a possibility. The materials were central—they were identified with English resource endowments and carefully honed English metallurgical skills. Metals that were strong, malleable and ductile, easily plated or converted to other alloys, and amenable to polishing and cutting provided much-soughtafter imitations of gold, silver, and precious stones. Completely different products might be made from them, so that they took on a special attraction in themselves. High-grade steel was made in Tyneside, Birmingham, and Sheffield by the early eighteenth century. Using coal made the difference. A continental technology of refining blister steel was altered with the use of coal rather than charcoal as a fuel; after 1740 there was also crucible cast steel invented in England by Benjamin Huntsman. These steel materials were used in many of the fashion goods, especially buckles, and drove the French to seek ways of making English steel, as well as finding English workers and plans for the mechanical polishing mills that made the finished product.The steel was crucial, not just to the quality of the decorative products, but also to the hand tools that shaped, refined, and fitted the goods.The barriers to getting such steel should not be underestimated. Where hardware and metal decorative goods were made in France, ‘hardware manufacturers, clock-makers, jewellers, cutlers, armourers only employ English steel, others are only used by the serruriers (locksmiths) and for coarse work’.⁴⁸ ⁴⁶ Ibid., ii, 400. ⁴⁷ Dickinson, Matthew Boulton, 72. ⁴⁸ Harris, Industrial Espionage, 214.

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How it was Made

Fig. 5.5. Boulton cut-steel jewellery with Wedgwood blue jasper reliefs. V&A Images Victoria and Albert Museum.

Brass, tin, pinchbeck (an alloy of copper and zinc), and tutania (an alloy of brass, antimony, and tin) were all easily amenable to the mechanical techniques used in the toy trades, and the novelty of their application made them attractive to consumers. Pinchbeck, which by the nineteenth century was to be surpassed only by Britannia metal as a sham, a low-grade imitation of gold, was at this time praised for ingenuity. Luxury alloys were also deployed by Boulton, taking up the French fashion for ormolu (an alloy of copper and zinc), which was then gilted. He applied the metal to simple designs inspired by Greek ornament, seeking to put a British stamp on his products. Mrs Montagu supported his cause. ‘Go on then Sir, to triumph over the ~ 176 ~

Metal Things French in taste & to embellish your country with useful inventions & elegant productions.’⁴⁹ But he set his luxury prices too high, and failed to sell. The materials were not only new or used in novel ways, such as polished or cut steel: they could be shaped with the new Birmingham and Sheffield tools and machines. The stamp, die, press and rolling mill, and a wide variety of lathes, added to the traditional working tools of the metalworker— the anvil, hammer, file, and grindstone. Where, earlier, sheet metal had to be beaten out with a hammer, the rolling mill mechanized the process and produced uniform sheets of set thickness. Dies and stamping machines allowed toymakers to replace casting.The stamp and press could produce a deep impression on medallions, or on head pins; they could produce a concave button or stamped brassware and silver-plated candlesticks. It was said that the stamps and dies gave a uniformity of appearance to Sheffield pieces when these were compared to London silverware made in the traditional way.⁵⁰ A typical button- or bucklemaker had several different-sized stamps, a number of cutting out and piercing presses, a variety of lathes, a machine for turning links, a polishing engine, and a number of vices, die punches, and smaller tools. Such machines and tools were applied with the division of labour. ‘When a man stamps on a metal Button by means of an Engine, a Child stands by him to place the Button in readiness to receive the Stamp, and to remove it when received and then to place another . . . And hence it is that the bijoux d’Angleterre, or the Birmingham Toys are rendered so exceeding cheap as to astonish all Europe.’⁵¹ Yet even more impressive than the tools and division of labour (the division of labour and the use of dies were already established parts of the London luxury trades) was the use of ‘engines’, powered via wheels and bands by hand, horse, water, and eventually steam.The appearance of these early machine tools was not so far removed from the textile machines that would follow in the next twenty years, mills with multiple drives powering machines on several floors. Boulton in 1770 thought his works well suited to the new manufacture of plate and ormolu: ‘I have almost every machine that is applicable to those Arts. I have two Water mills employed in rolling, polishing, grinding & turning various sorts of Laths . . .’⁵² Birmingham’s reputation for its metalworking machines and engines ⁴⁹ Montagu to Boulton, 31 Oct. 1771 (Matthew Boulton Papers, 330/1). ⁵⁰ Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention’, 243. ⁵¹ Tucker, The Elements of Commerce and Theory of Taxes, MS 1755, Manuscript edition in the Royal Society of Arts. ⁵² Dickinson, Matthew Boulton, 60; also see Harris, Industrial Espionage, 183.

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How it was Made went with its inventiveness not just in making metal products, but in all manner of machines and techniques for different industries, as well as art and finishing processes. It was in Birmingham that Wyatt and Paul tried to develop their spinning machine, and in Birmingham that transfer-printing processes, subsequently extensively used in decorating ceramics, were first developed. Political and economic commentators paid tribute to the inventiveness of Birmingham and its region and Sheffield. Josiah Tucker wrote: Few countries are equal, perhaps none excel the English in the Numbers and contrivances of their Machines to abridge Labour . . . when we still consider that at Birmingham, Wolverhampton, Sheffield and other manufacturing places, almost every Master Manufacturer hath a new invention of his own, and is daily improving on those of others.⁵³

Patenting activity was no simple indicator of this inventiveness. Birmingham, one of the places with the most prolific invention of goods, gadgets, new materials, and machinery, claimed only 102 patents over the whole period 1680 to 1800. Of these, 75 per cent were related to the Birmingham trades as well as to metallurgy and engine-making, and 63 per cent of Sheffield’s patents were focused on metalworking, plating, and steel making. But consumer goods dominated those that were taken out—patents for new products, for small improvements in the manufacture of trinkets and buttons, for the machine tools and metal compositions and the scientific instrument to make them. Manufacturers took out over a third of the town’s patents in the 1780s, and over half of these were for buckles and buttons.⁵⁴ Invention was about new goods, about ornamenting or finishing of a range of existing goods, on extending the qualities and varieties within ranges of goods, and on novelties and showy luxuries. Birmingham’s most famous patent holders were Edward Thomason, inventor of retractable carriage steps, and Henry Clay, inventor of japanned papier mâché in 1772. Clay’s manufactory was described as ‘curious, ingenious and deserving of both praise and encouragement’. It ‘turned out paper vases, stands, waiters, tea-boards, coach panels etc. all of paper finely varnished and painted’. Metropolitan manufacturers also patented their consumer novelties. John Pickering, the London jeweller who invented pinchbeck, also took out a patent in 1769 for ‘chasing in gold, silver and other metals, coffin furniture, ornaments for coaches, chariots, sedans and other carriages’. John Skidmore, a ⁵³ Josiah Tucker, Instructions for Travellers (London, 1757), 20–1. ⁵⁴ R. B. Prosser, Birmingham Inventors and Inventions (Birmingham, 1881); Christine MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System 1660–1800 (Cambridge, 1988), 124–31.

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Metal Things Clerkenwell stove gratemaker, in 1786 patented a process for ornamenting china and earthenware with foil stones, Bristol stones, paste and all sorts of pinched glass, sapped glass, and every other stone, glass, and composition used in or applicable to the jewellery trade. But Obadiah Westwood, a Birmingham button maker, was not to be outdone, and in 1796 registered a patent for making tea and other trays, waiters, card pans, caddies, dressing boxes, bottle stands, coat, breast, vest, sleeve and other buttons, frames for pictures and looking glasses and other things; moulding, cornices and ornaments for rooms, ceilings, chimney pieces, doors, panels, and various other purposes.⁵⁵ Clay’s patent was quickly picked up by the newspapers, and shopkeepers were alarmed at the prospect of being left with stocks of out-of-fashion pearl buttons.⁵⁶ When patents like this made the news they advertised the product and the firm. They were in many ways a form of advertisement, an endorsement, a sign of modernity and technical ingenuity. But competition was so fierce in fast-moving fashion markets that expensive patenting processes formed no protection for intellectual property rights. Instead the patent was itself a consumer good, displaying the patent holder’s place in enlightened society as a creator of novelties, as making advances based on scientific principles, as part of the world of the arts.

All that Glisters is not Gold: Quality Controls Product innovation and the invention of new materials generated a widespread debate on quality controls. New consumer goods marketed as semiluxuries, frequently produced and sold alongside luxury ware, acquired new definitions of quality, and markets depended on this. For Birmingham manufacturers there were the past accusations of shoddy goods that the new luxury and semi-luxury ware was intended to displace. Boulton spoke of the making up of a sword hilt ‘whose beauty shall be in good workmanship and fine polish rather than in abundance of niggling work. If I had 100 or 1000 Hilts that were really good work and good taste, I could sell them, but bad Brumigan work will not sell.’⁵⁷ Birmingham manufacturers who aspired to produce works of art and luxury depended on institutions to protect the integrity of the market.The larger manufacturers, ⁵⁵ Woodcroft, Titles of Patents of Invention, Patent 920, 7 Mar. 1769; Patent 737, 10 Feb. 1759; Patent 1552, 5 Aug. 1786; Patent 1576, 14 Dec. 1796. ⁵⁶ Fothergill to Boulton, 14 Feb. 1778, 20 Feb. 1778 (Matthew Boulton Papers, 307). ⁵⁷ Boulton to Fothergill, 11 May 1773 (Matthew Boulton Papers, 307).

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How it was Made

Fig. 5.6. Patent carriage steps: Edward Thomason’s Manufactory, Church Street Birmingham Where may be had for Exportation all kinds of Buttons, Watch Chains, Ear-rings, Necklaces, Seals, Keys, faux Montres, And all such kinds of Toys—The Poetic Survey and Magnificent Directory of Birmingham, ed. James Bisset, 1800. Birmingham Central Library.

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Metal Things especially Matthew Boulton, took the lead in framing these institutions. They led the international markets, they connected what they produced to the trade in luxury goods, and on this basis they devised and enforced the rules of trade for new goods. Those rules were about Assay offices, plating and jewellery, and measures of gold in gilting: they provoked debate and sometimes newspaper and pamphlet wars, parliamentary petitioning, and court cases in Sheffield and London as well as in Birmingham. The London goldsmiths retreated in their efforts to control product innovation, organization of production, and apprenticeship regulations. By 1700, as we have seen, there were Assay Offices in several county towns in addition to London, and in 1738 jewellers’ work was exempted from hallmarking regulation. Silver plating raised another challenge. Silver makers traditionally identified their products with their mark, which was a way of tracking makers and guaranteeing the quality of the metal. There was a common practice of stamping early goods made in Sheffield or Birmingham with London marks to raise the market value of the goods. Plated ware was similarly marked with its maker’s name, though these were not registered silver marks. Such marking of plated ware would ‘gratify their Customers, as it made the Work look more like Silver’.⁵⁸ London goldsmiths, competing with their rivals in Birmingham and Sheffield, made an issue of marking plated wares in this way. Both towns campaigned for Assay Offices of their own in the early 1770s; assaying was symbolic of the success of the new provincial manufacturers against the monopoly interests of the London companies. Boulton saw an Assay Office in Birmingham as a statement renouncing past associations with counterfeiters and fraudsters, and establishing Birmingham’s claim to a new rightful place with the capitals of Europe as a producer of a store of value. The Assay Offices were established after intensive lobbying and long meetings in Committee in 1773. But a clause forebade the striking of letters or marks on articles ‘made of metal, plated or covered with silver, or upon any metal vessel or other thing made to look like silver’.The clause was eventually modified in 1784, so that platers could mark their ware with their surname, partnership name, and any device as long as it was not a registered silver mark.⁵⁹ Attempts to set quality standards and agencies to enforce these also prompted competitive divisions among producers. The Button Act in the 1790s codified standards of gold content in gilting, and prosecutions in 1799 revealed a protest from small manufacturers against monopoly controls enforced by Boulton and his collaborators. By this means, ‘the industrious ⁵⁸ Cited in Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention’, 248.

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⁵⁹ Ibid.

How it was Made mechanic [was] prevented from the natural exercise of his talent, being also in fear of the constable’s search warrant—is not this made more likely to destroy trade than to increase it?’⁶⁰ Such was the plea of a newer small producer trying to invent his own new products and materials against the controls of large, established producers such as Matthew Boulton, who had once fought for his own legitimacy against the London goldsmiths. But the new metal consumer goods gained their domestic and foreign markets through linking onto the networks of luxury markets. Their British identity was about novelty, innovation, and fashion, to be sure, but it was also to be about quality. The extent to which Birmingham and Sheffield ware could become commodities depended on access to bourgeois markets with aspirations to artistic and luxury values. That access was seen to rely in turn on standards of quality control.

Marketing, Prices, and Advertising Fashionable London goldsmiths’, silversmiths’, toymakers’, and jewellers’ shops sold all manner of decorative ware together—silver displayed beside silver plate, candlesticks and cutlery, tea urns and buckles, clocks and lamps. Hardwaremen in the city were large and extensive businesses which, like Warner and Cooke of New Bond Street in 1772, sold locks, hinges, nails, and brass cabinet goods along with copper utensils, plated goods, japanned waiters, table knives and forks, and gentlemen’s tool chests.⁶¹ Many bought in Birmingham toys and Sheffield plated goods, sometimes overstamping these with their own marks. Just as in the case of glass and ceramics, access to the metropolis was the key to marketing the new goods. Small, highvalue goods were more frequently transported by coach, with journey times from Birmingham to London falling steadily after the mid-eighteenth century.⁶² Bradbury, the Sheffield plate manufacturer, sent goods totalling in value from £20 to £100 each week or fortnight by coach to London retailers.⁶³ Birmingham’s gazetteers and historians celebrated the modernity of her marketing, a transition from the small producer in provincial isolation secluded in his forge to the international merchant traversing not just Europe, but the colonies and the Americas. ⁶⁰ George Madeley (16 Aug. 1799), Birmingham Button Disputes, City Archives, Birmingham Central Library. ⁶¹ Barnett, London, Hub of the Industrial Revolution, 164; Clifford, ‘A Commerce with Things’, 165. ⁶² Eric Hopkins, Birmingham (London, 1989), 28. ⁶³ Thomas Bradbury & Sons, London Stock Book 1791–1800, Bradbury Records 239, Sheffield City Archives.

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Metal Things The commercial spirit of the age, hath also penetrated beyond the confines of Britain, and explored the whole continent of Europe; nor does it stop there, for the West Indies, the American world, are intimately acquainted with the Birmingham merchant; and nothing but the exclusive command of the East India Company, over the Asiatic trade, prevents our riders from treading upon the heels of each other, in the streets of Calcutta.⁶⁴

The Birmingham and Sheffield travellers were prominent among chapmen and pedlars, along with the Manchester chapmen and Wiltshire clothiers. There was the Birmingham traveller with his set of patterns, ‘portable showrooms long enclosed within the swollen receptacles of a pair of leather saddlebags’, but which came to weigh 5 cwt. and formed ‘a full and ample load for a one horse carriage’.⁶⁵ Before the eighteenth century the Sheffield cutlers sold through travelling Scottish and Irish chapmen, but a permanent group of merchants was settled in the town from the mideighteenth century. World marketing extending to Africa and the Americas was no innovation of the last half of the eighteenth century. Birmingham and Sheffield brass and ironware, cutlery, locks, brass coffin furniture, and candlesticks were traded throughout Britain’s and Europe’s fairs, and factors travelled to the Americas and promoted the Africa trade from the beginning of the century.⁶⁶ The American market was the most important export market for wares of both Birmingham and Sheffield by the later eighteenth century, taking half of Sheffield’s cutlery and other metalwares from the 1770s.⁶⁷ Most brass and copper companies had warehouses and agents in the more important industrial centres—Bristol, Birmingham, London, and Liverpool—by the mid-eighteenth century, and sold through factors, chapmen, and merchants. Smaller firms relied on factors and merchants as the principal outlet for their sales; there were eighty-five merchants and factors listed in Birmingham’s 1777 Directory. Most foreign trade went through major merchant houses in London and Liverpool.The long credit terms required, as well as the variety of goods requested in any individual order, demanded such specialization. Major international merchants such as Lewis Baumgartner and John Motteux developed into bankers for their clients. ⁶⁴ William Hutton, A History of Birmingham to the End of the Year 1780 (Birmingham, 1781). ⁶⁵ William Hawkes Smith, Birmingham and its Vicinity as a Manufacturing and Commercial District (London, 1836); Eric Robinson,‘Boulton and Fothergill 1762–1782 and the Birmingham Export of Hardware’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, 7 (1959–60), 60–79. ⁶⁶ Eversley, ‘Industry and Trade’ 1500‒1800’, Victoria County History of Warwickshire (London, 1964) vii, 81‒139, pp. 91–2. ⁶⁷ Leader, Sheffield in the Eighteenth Century, 92; P. Garlick,‘The Sheffield Cutlery and Allied Trades’ (MA thesis, University of Sheffield, 1951), 88, 120.

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How it was Made There were those who went their own way. John Taylor, and most notably Matthew Boulton, acted as their own merchants, and also sold for other Birmingham small producers. But Boulton’s experience as a global trader was no great success story. Fothergill travelled Europe and Russia for orders in 1765, and gathered a number of orders on credit, but the firm only ever received a fraction of the money owed.⁶⁸ A letter he sent from Lübeck in 1766 tells of the problems in getting orders. ‘This is certainly a very dull place; some of the small shopkeepers in our way are gone to Brunswick fair . . . others having parted with their orders for this season to Freese & Mooday and Ford . . . I only seek to establish a correspondence for the future. I propose going through Denmark and Sweden where we have at present no correspondents.’⁶⁹ Orders came from Messina for plated buttons, snuff boxes, chains and steel sword hilts, and markets for candlesticks and clocks were noted in Russia; but Boulton had to compete with fellow producers for any of these foreign markets. One correspondent wrote to him that his goods ‘are dearer than others [buttons and chains]. People abroad give preference to what is pretty, showy and cheap.’⁷⁰ While Boulton’s own trading ventures were not infrequently little short of disastrous, this was not the point. Boulton made his products international; in foreign and home markets they were Soho goods, not generic Birmingham ware. His own efforts, not immediately profitable, nevertheless spread the name and enhanced prestige in home markets. Some of the larger Sheffield firms also started their own selling operations from the end of the century. Thomas Nowill, a pen- and pocket-knife cutler, in 1786 went into partnership with Thomas Hague, and they sold directly to customers in London, and to other firms in Birmingham, London, Bristol, and Sheffield. Nowill & Hague were selling in Germany, Spain, France, and Russia by the last decade of the century, and Sheffield’s cutlery and hardware was reported to be exported to the West Indies, China, and Japan by the 1780s. Sheffield plated and silverware makers exported their goods to major markets in the USA, Canada, and the West Indies. Thomas Bradbury, the plate manufacturer, filled orders from Kingston, Jamaica, Bermuda, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Canada, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and ⁶⁸ Leader, Sheffield in the Eighteenth Century, 73, 114–16; J. E. Cule, ‘The Financial History of Matthew Boulton 1759–1800’, M. Comm. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1935. ⁶⁹ Fothergill to Boulton, 31 July 1766 (Matthew Boulton Papers, 307). ⁷⁰ Du Rovesay to Boulton, 1771 (Matthew Boulton Papers, DBF, D2/339–43); Baron Cathcart to Boulton & Fothergill, 21 Feb. 1772 (Matthew Boulton Papers, DBF, C194); Mierrs to Boulton, 11 June 1771 (Matthew Boulton DBF, M1/253).

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Metal Things Table 5.2. Prices of Sheffield Plate, 1796 11 plated candlesticks Plated chocolate pot and stand Egg shaped coffee pot Pair of snuffers with silver edges

£2.8s. 0d. 3.3s. 0d. 2.16s. 0d. 4.12s. 0d.

Source: Bradbury Papers. BR169, Sheffield City Archives.

Table 5.3. Prices of iron and brass candlesticks and cutlery, 1793–1794 1 pair of brass candlesticks 2 pair of iron candlesticks 1/2 doz. knives & forks 1 /2 doz. knives 1 /2 doz. iron spoons Iron warming pan

7s. 6d. 4s. 0d. 8s. 0d. 4s. 6d. 2s. 6d. 14s. 0d.

Source: B. R. Tomlinson, Braziers and Tin Plate Manufacturers, Stafford Papers, 1768–1839. Staffordshire County Record Office.

Hamburg as well as Dublin, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Birmingham, and London.⁷¹ Prices for all these goods sold at home and in the wide-ranging corners of world trade ranged from those for expensive luxuries afforded only by the elites and better-off middling classes, to the decencies acquired by artisans and small tradespeople who might save as much as a week’s wages to buy them. Selling in London, for big firms like Matthew Boulton’s, meant shops, display rooms, or good agents, and selling at home and abroad meant advertising, trade cards, and the distribution of patterns and trade catalogues. Like the Soho factory itself, establishing a retail outlet in London was the subject of much angst. Wedgwood was setting up his display rooms at the same time, and both he and Boulton sought to sell in galleries and exhibition spaces. Boulton was offered sale space in the Adams brothers’ premises in Durham Yard, but eventually abandoned the idea; the capital required to ⁷¹ Thomas Nowill Papers, Sheffield City Archives; Thesis on Thomas Nowill, 1786–1825; Thomas Bradbury & Sons, Order Book, Bradbury Records 240, Sheffield City Archives.

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How it was Made run such an operation was too great, and there was an easier alternative in the auction rooms and his agents. He sold his best pieces at special sales between 1770 and 1772 at Christie’s and Ansell’s Show Rooms in Pall Mall.⁷² A week-long sale in 1771 faced competition from exhibitions of Derby porcelain and Cox’s automata as well as Wedgwood’s own vase ware.⁷³ The luxury trades advertised their wares, making sophisticated though limited use of trade cards, pattern books, and trade catalogues. The new consumer goods producers took this model of visual advertising to new heights. The engraved plates in Bisset’s Magnificent Directory were quickly adapted to trade cards. The trade card, sometimes used on bill heads, but most frequently distributed as a small engraved sheet or card, displayed pictures of premises and goods or emblems and symbols along with names of proprietors and addresses and frequently extensive listings of products and services. Trade cards were by no means new to the eighteenth century or to the semi-luxury trades.They date back to the Renaissance, and a number of sixteenth-century continental examples survive.⁷⁴ But they proliferated in the eighteenth century, used by all manner of manufacturers, retailers, and providers of services. Their manipulation of text and image became common tropes. Merchants took readily to the pattern books. Again no invention of the eighteenth century, key luxury producers from the fifteenth century on made limited use of the pattern books.⁷⁵ The difference was the number of pattern books and the new departure of the trade catalogue for much less prestigious goods; ‘the weight of the “portable showrooms” in pedlars’ packs gave way to patterns, cards and models’.⁷⁶ Pattern books would be sent out to agents to be returned in six to twelve months. The patterns might be actual specimens of buttons or buckles, and engraved drawings of brassfoundry and all other larger products. The pattern books were also special codes. Designs and products could be displayed and advertised, and orders taken, but pattern numbers, prices, discounts, and terms of credit were all kept secret.⁷⁷ Pattern books and trade catalogues were deeply entrenched in ⁷² Dickinson, Matthew Boulton, 62. ⁷³ Josiah Wedgwood to Thomas Bentley, 11 Apr. 1772 (Wedgwood Papers, E25–18365), Wedgwood Archives, University of Keele. ⁷⁴ ‘Recueil d’Adresses’, 4 vols. Bound Collection of Trade Cards, Waddesdon Manor, TC1919, Rothschild Collection. ⁷⁵ Timothy Clifford, Designs of Desire (Edinburgh, 1999), 11–15, 43–9. ⁷⁶ Katie Scott, ‘The Waddesdon Trade Cards: More than One History’, Journal of Design History, 17 (2004), 92–100. ⁷⁷ Robinson, ‘Boulton and Fothergill,’ 71.

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Metal Things the domestic and international trade by the 1740s; yet Wedgwood in the 1760s claimed the idea for his own: When I had the pleasure of seeing you last you mention’d a scheme of dispersing abroad the patterns of our Manufacture, in a way which struck me then, and has since engaged a good deal of my attention; which was by means of engraved prints of all the Articles we make accompanying one piece of the Manufacture. The thought pleased me much, both as I apprehend it w’d be the quickest and most Eligible mode of extending the knowledge of our Manufacture abroad where patterns could not with any sort of Convenience be sent in specie, & likewise as I am fully perswaded a considerable, & profitable branch of Commerce may be as it were erected by this new mode of shewing the World what we have to dispose of . . .⁷⁸

Boulton’s Soho Pattern Books of 1762 are the earliest pattern books to survive for the plated metalware trade, and they were quickly followed by brassware, general metalwork, silver-plated ware, and ironwork catalogues in the later 1760s and 1770s. A large number of brassware catalogues were produced, indicating the huge success of the brass-founders in export markets. Finely executed designs displayed the new goods as works of art, drawing on the inspiration of the classics for designs of plated teapots, brass escutcheons, glass salt and pepper sets, or watch frames.The catalogues also displayed groups of goods which complemented each other, teaching taste and settings for consumption. Plated teawares were put with ceramics and pieces of glassware, candlesticks and trays beside coffee urns. Local marketing also had its place. Birmingham and Sheffield themselves had toy, jewellers’, and cutlers’ shops (see Table 5.4). Some sold their ware in factory shops much as today—Boulton, Taylor, and Baskerville sold in this way to visitors. Some set up separate shops in the town centre, or sold from their warehouses. John Reeves, a Japanner, advertised in 1798 that he had opened ‘a commodious shop at 35 New Street, Birmingham, and furnished it with every article in the Japan trade, which he intends selling wholesale and retail on moderate terms’. He directed customers to make their orders there or at his manufactory in Snow Hill. Edward Durnall, a brazier and tin-plate worker, advertised goods sold from his copper furnace warehouse at 49 the High Street, Birmingham. He claimed that ‘he has just finished a complete assortment of block tin plate kitchen furniture, equally wholesome as silver, made after a new method, whereby they are prevented from unsoldering, and rendered more durable than any others’. His warehouse, he declared, also sold a whole range of other brass and copper goods, ⁷⁸ Wedgwood to Boulton, 9 Aug. 1767 (Matthew Boulton Papers, 361).

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How it was Made Table 5.4. Local retailing. Birmingham and Sheffield Birmingham 1767 Toymakers Jewellers Cutlers Ironmongers Bucklemakers Buttonmakers Japanners

Sheffield 1774 57 25 12 34 52 108 25

Cutlers Silver and silver-plated ware Razormakers Inkstandmakers Buttonmakers

203 16

26 5 13

Sources: Sketchley’s Birmingham Directory (Birmingham, 1767); The Sheffield Directory (1774).

Dutch tea urns ‘of the most elegant and approved taste’ and cast iron pots, furnaces, and grates.⁷⁹ Other shops advertised their metropolitan or international connections. William Goodes, Toyman at 21 New Street, Birmingham, advertised the arrival of a ‘large and well-selected assortment of foreign and English Toys, cutlery, Hardware, perfumery etc.’, and John Clarke, Perfumer, Cutler and Toyman at 77 Bull Street, Birmingham, advertised his return from London where he had selected a ‘choice assortment of perfumery in all its different branches, from the first houses of London, and his friends may rely upon having genuine articles’. And likewise he ‘has the greatest assortment of toys that has ever been seen in any shop out of London’. He would ‘spare no pain or expense to gratify their [his friends’] curiosity’.⁸⁰

British Goods and Foreign Markets Making the wide range of ornamental decorative goods and useful hardware that came to be identified with English or British metal goods depended on access to materials, skills, labour, and sometimes tools from France, Sweden, and Germany. But even more significantly, making markets for these goods abroad depended on giving them a British identity. That identity, as we have seen, relied partly on materials, more on industrial organization and ⁷⁹ Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, Birmingham, 3 Oct. 1796; 30 July 1798. ⁸⁰ Ibid., 4 June 1798; 30 July 1798.

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Metal Things technologies, but crucially on identifying the products themselves with Britishness. Paradoxically, Boulton created that identity using foreign expertise. He employed French and German artists and designers to teach drawing and designing. When he tried to break into the French ormolu trade, he used a Paris merchant to get suitable workers, and also employed a French gilder. He accessed trade secrets through two foreign partners, John Friedrich Bargum, founder of the Danish Guinea Company, and John Herman Ebbinghaus, a German hardware merchant. He used a German contact to find good engravers in Vienna, Hanau, Berlin, and Sweden. He employed the leading European engravers, Droz and Kuchler, and Kern, a Saxon jeweller who was expert at inlaying steel with gold and silver. And he was not alone in this practice. John Taylor also had highly paid French employees.⁸¹ These manufacturers used their European craftsmen, not, however, to copy their models, but instead directed their skills to different products and materials. Generic Birmingham skills in working metals, infused with closely targeted European craftsmanship, provoked a rethinking of materials and what might be made of them. Cultural transmission as well as indigenous understanding made up the ‘useful knowledge’ underlying the new British metal consumer goods trade. Manufacturers, alert to their new competitive advantage, worked hard to keep this trade, first by preventing any export back to the rest of Europe of the new technologies, and secondly by so closely identifying the goods with British production that market preferences abroad would remain with British products. They feared a migration of the new skills and export of machinery, and lobbied for legislation to stop these. Two acts in 1719 and 1750 prohibited skilled artisans from leaving the country. Further acts in 1750 and 1785 prohibited the export of the tools and machinery used in the cotton, woollen, and silk industries as well as in iron and steel manufacture. Their fears were not misplaced. Birmingham’s Michael Alcock defected to France with machinery and workers, abandoning his successful large-scale toyworks, and founded La Charité, the first major French toyworks. British visitors in the 1770s and 1780s, including Boulton, criticized the works, and in so doing they left us with more insight into their own practices. They noted that though the factory had machines similar to those in Birmingham, there was no water mill. And Alcock in France used charcoal not coal. There was a horse-powered mill for rolling metal, but not multiple drives to machines on several floors. Factory organization was also deficient, with too much ⁸¹ Harris, Industrial Espionage, 499.

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How it was Made carried out in one great hall under the supervision of a single manager. Semi-autonomous departments selling on parts and goods to the next department would provide more effective organization for the multiple processing and products of the works; the factory also needed to concentrate on stock items, leaving high fashion items to be made nearer to Paris. Whatever the deficiencies of La Charité, when individual workers moved on to other places they diffused the Birmingham technology.The goods and works subsequently set up to produce them in France had become British in the process. One projector, Charles de Saudray, advertised a plan in 1775 to set up a French company entitled ‘Manufacture Royale a l’imitation de celle de Birmingham’. He thought he had all the ingredients—machines, matrices and tools, labour skilled in gilding, in silver plating, in enamelling copper, and in making pinchbeck and ormolu, as well as a connection between the use of machinery and child labour. But the goods were perceived as British. Products of French factories, even fifty years after the introduction of British methods, were still falsely stamped with London marks because there was still a French consumer preference for British buttons and buckles.⁸² And it was not just buttons and buckles—the wide range of steel toys, silver-plated teaware, decorative brassware, and hardware from locks to screws and hinges had insinuated a British identity into consumer ware and everyday objects bought by European and American consumers. Product lines and designs were carefully defined to connect new products—the leading edge of a design shift from the rococo to the neoclassical with British production and technology. Boulton and Wedgwood both articulated an anti-French design strategy to simplify, to move away from excessive ornament and glitter; the product shift was ideal for a technology based on dies, stamps, moulds, and cast and polished steel. Yet great efforts were made by most European countries to stem the flow of these new British goods. The French prohibited imports of pinchbeck in 1740, and metal buttons in 1749; the Portuguese prohibited the import of Birmingham hardware in 1760, as did the Swedes later. But the prohibitions did not stop the trade; smuggling was rampant. ‘The following goods to go into France labelled as German: knives, penknives, steel and pinchbeck buckles (white and yellow), pinchbeck buttons for sleeves (white and yellow), razors with handles encrusted with yellow in imitation of turtleshell, steel spurs, corkscrews, pinchbeck rings (white and yellow), pinchbeck ⁸² Harris, Industrial Espionage, 173–83, 189–93.

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Metal Things coverts for coffee (white and yellow).’⁸³ The British negotiated hard to have the trade restrictions lifted in petitions, correspondence, and committees. The French eventually gave up their ban in the terms of the French Commercial Treaty of 1760. Markets were also cultivated in Germany and Italy. Though there was already a large manufacture of metalwares, including toys in Germany, the British took advantage of the great fairs of Brunswick, Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg. These attracted a large international clientele and the wealthy from all over the German states and elsewhere. They were exhibition centres for international luxury and fashion goods. Matthew Boulton established a special connection with Wedgwood to ply the German princes with ‘packages’ containing sample vases and creamware as well as silver plate and ormolu. The message was new fashion British luxury goods. Likewise Italian markets were fostered through agents in Genoa, Leghorn, and Naples. Connections were established alongside those of Bentley and Wedgwood with Hamilton who spread the fashion for British toys among the Neapolitan nobility.⁸⁴ Ultimately, however, the decorative metalwares were fashion items. This is where their markets were made and spread across social classes. Ephemeral clothing items such as wigs, buckled shoes, and polished metal buttons passed from a style to an institution, and eventually faced their own fashion threats. New style for laced shoes and cloth-covered buttons appeared from France, and British consumer goods were once again pitted against French fashions. During the Revolution and the wars with France, consumer patriotism was economic as well as political. The King and Queen, and the Prince of Wales, an arbiter of fashion, were exhorted to wear buckles. ‘Taste which both decorated the persons of the rich and fed the hungry poor deserved the name of humanity: no doubt His Royal Highness would prefer the blessings of the starving manufacture to the encomiums of the drawing room.’ In the early 1790s, petitioning and pamphleteering on the buckle trade soon escalated to Church and King riots. The Birmingham Gazette in 1790 contrasted ‘the Manly buckle’ with ‘that most ridiculous of all ridiculous fashions, the effeminate shoestring’ as worn by ‘a few incorrigible petits maitres, against whom the shafts of ridicule are pointed in vain’. ‘Many thousands of industrious men and women are become almost

⁸³ L. Olieu to Boulton, 14 May 1772 (Matthew Boulton Papers, DBF 07). ⁸⁴ Robinson, ‘Boulton and Fothergill’, 60–70.

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How it was Made destitute of employment by the general use now made of buttons unlawfully covered, and which from our example is also become the prevailing fashion abroad.’The anti-jacobin pamphleteers associated with the mob attacks on those like Priestley, perceived to be French sympathizers, used the pseudonyms ‘Job Nott, Bucklemaker’ and ‘John Nott, Button Burnisher’.⁸⁵ In the event, patriotism provided another consumer outlet, and the war with France provided opportunities for new lines in commemorative medals. Just as with the political calendars commemorated in transfer-printed earthenware, war, battles, political and military figures, royalty, and historical and patriotic symbols all provided opportunities for striking medals, tokens, and badges. Matthew Boulton once again was a market leader; Edward Thomason and James Bisset followed.⁸⁶ Bisset, who had once ornamented coat buttons as large as Spanish dollars, turned his process of painting on glass to pictures. Later, as the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars took their toll on trade, and he failed to make a success of other fancy trades, he moved into political and royal medallions. He did Pitt and Fox, Lord Nelson and the royal family, and moved again onto an even financial footing.⁸⁷ ⁸⁵ This discussion is based on John Money, Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760–1800 (Manchester, 1977), 262–4. ⁸⁶ Peter Jones, ‘ “England Expects . . .”: Trading in Liberty in the Age of Trafalgar’, in M. Crook et al. (eds.), Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson (Aldershot, 2004), 187–204; Sir Edward Thomason’s Memoirs; Bisset, ‘Memoir’. ⁸⁷ On the commercialization of politics including commemorative transfer-printed ware see John Brewer, ‘Commercialisation and Politics’, in McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a Consumer Society, 197–264, esp. pp. 248–252; on patriotic societies see Colley, Britons, 95–100.

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Part III








A Nation of Shoppers 

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Those very British consumer goods, ingenious and convenient, those bijoux d’Angleterre, were modern spectacles of practical mechanics; they were also the affordable fashions that made for an international shopping culture in Europe and the Atlantic world. These were British goods, made to seize those international markets, but addressed at the outset to the people who best understood what these goods were about. The trading, middling classes of Britain shopped, as Defoe said, whenever they could, and they especially loved Saturday shopping. They defined their modernity by their possessions of newly invented goods, made by mechanical techniques.They bought and displayed what they liked; their possessions, Josiah Tucker argued in 1757, were a sign of their liberty. ‘England being a free country, where Riches got by trade are no disgrace, and where property is also safe against the prerogatives of either princes or Nobles, and where every person may make what display he pleases of his wealth.’¹ Changing consumer practices in the eighteenth century were led by these middling classes. Consumption shifted from defining social status to freeing ‘the impulses of the heart’. This diverse and highly differentiated group wielded disproportionate influence on wider consumer habits. We have seen how the goods the middling classes bought were designed and manufactured, but much more than material goods was made, for customers and shoppers themselves had to be ‘made’. Consumption was learned in response to the expansion of goods, to the multiplication of choice, to new and more specialized shops, and to advertising and fashion codes. The English middling class was already significant at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but it grew substantially as a proportion of the social structure over the course of the century, even when the gulf between the incomes of the very rich and the poor was widening. Economic improvement and urban development in Scotland, and Irish ascendancy extended the strength of these groups across the British Isles. This was a middling class highly diverse in its occupational structure and levels of incomes. It was geographically dispersed, and not just a feature of the metropolis. Its urban profile set it apart from the social structures of the rest of Europe, and especially important were the new commercial and industrial towns of ¹ Tucker, Instructions for Travellers, 26.

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A Nation of Shoppers the midlands and the north. However dispersed these groups, or whatever the range of their incomes, codes of politeness and self-respect were conveyed in living designs and practices, ranging from taking tea, visiting, and dining, to cooking and serving meals. But these middling groups were also flexible enough to absorb those who had made good. While they could connect with each other through particular practices of sociability and recognizable material cultures, they were still open to individuality and personal choice. The lifestyles of rich celebrities had a wide appeal then as now, and historians have continued to parade the shopping habits of the Duchess of Devonshire or Lady Caroline Lennox. The metropolitan elites may have been the big spenders of the their time, but they represented a tiny proportion of the population, and the adventurous lead in creating a broad base of consumer spending was taken amongst those who, with less money, had recently prospered, the middling classes. Their new consumer culture was, furthermore, made not just in London, but in the midlands and the north, and among the industrial and trading as well as lower middling classes. Their new wealth was frequently based in producing new consumer goods, or in extending consumer society in the regions. The new commodities were not just the stuff of women’s desires, of shopping for bargains or making style. They were just as much about men’s acquisitiveness, of their passion for goods that marked out respectability and independence. Translucent porcelain and gleaming metal, crystal glass and smooth mahogany: in their many forms and spatial presentation they carried and conveyed gender characteristics. While we know much about aspirations for fashion clothing in the eighteenth century, the new decorative ware was also bought to mark out manhood on the one hand and femininity on the other. Specific purchases of furnishings, of teaware, silver plate or cutlery, and linen marked stages in the setting up of a household for both men and women. But watches and chains, shoe and knee buckles, silver sugar tongs, new model candle snuffers or corkscrews, occasional enamelled plates, silver spoons, and pepper casters were bought for design, and for presents to friends and relatives. These items furnishing and decorating middling-class homes were new, affordable, and above all fashionable. Fashion theory focuses not on the unique product, but on collections, imitation, seriality, ornament, and commodity groupings. These were certainly developed in clothing, but they were just as quickly developed in furnishings and decorative ware, and Britain was to take the initiatives in these in the last half of the eighteenth century. New British consumer goods—Staffordshire earthenware, lead ~ 196 ~

A Nation of Shoppers glass crystal and Bristol blue glass, Sheffield plate and English tea tables, Axminster and Kidderminster carpets, japanned trays, Birmingham brassware, Sheffield tea and coffee urns all scooped home and foreign markets because they were fashion leaders. The fashion of these products was conveyed through astute attention to advertising. The illustrated commercial trade catalogue and the trade card allowed producers and merchants to picture their goods, not just in isolation, but in association with other complementary products, and in settings and in literary contexts conveying good taste. This particular group of new consumer goods led the way in innovative selling. Toy shops sold the most modern ornamental metalwares, jewellery, watches and clocks, as well as glass and ceramics. Shops and galleries, and graphic presentation in trade cards used room settings and collections and complementary goods to sell good taste, just as conversation pieces, a broader graphic print culture, country house visits, theatre, and novels did at a higher social level. Developing markets abroad was crucial to the success of new consumer goods. But this was achieved not by adapting to local cultural frameworks, but by aggressively making British commodities fashionable, a form of branding with British national identity. The new goods were endowed with a British style, and this style was sold abroad. This is apparent in the quantities and the descriptors of these goods in the Customs Accounts of the time, and in the advertisements in colonial newspapers.The largest markets outside Britain for the new commodities were in the Atlantic world; British goods dominated the consumer cultures of the American and Caribbean colonies. Adam Smith thought this Atlantic shopping centre was an edifice of the Navigation Acts.‘A great empire has been established for the sole purpose of raising up a nation of customers who should be obliged to buy from the shops of our different producers, all the goods with which these could supply them . . . the home-consumers have been burdened with the whole expense of maintaining and defending that empire.’² Consumers in Europe, enthusiastic in the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, were thwarted in the later parts of the century by high tariff barriers, war, and blockade. But the taste for English goods was well entrenched; the goods were imitated in their turn. Those large middling-class markets at home and in the American colonies combined with Britain’s advanced technologies to give those British goods the edge in Europe as well, whatever the imitations, as soon as trade barriers were relaxed in the years following the Napoleonic Wars. ² Smith, Wealth of Nations, ii. 661.

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6


Men and Women of the Middling Classes: Acquisitiveness and Self-Respect . . . it is a true observation that almost the whole body of the People of Great Britain may be considered either as the customers to or the manufacturers for each other. Josiah Tucker, ‘The Elements of Commerce and Theory of Taxes’

William Hutton and James Bisset both came to Birmingham at formative stages of their lives; both prospered there, and in their different ways celebrated the town and its making of the new middling classes of provincial industrial England. They both left memoirs of their lives, and how they came as young men to want to dress well and in fashion, to find lodgings and later houses, and to buy the personal and domestic possessions that they identified with their personalities and paths to modest middling-class prosperity. Neither Hutton nor Bisset achieved the great wealth of the Bristol or London merchants of the Atlantic trades or the cotton magnates of the early nineteenth century. Indeed both went through apprenticeships and the insecurities of tradesmen’s lives in the course of succeeding within the expanding consumer economy of eighteenth-century Birmingham. The progression of their own lives as consumers, as well as those we more frequently hear as producers or writers, reveals the variety and the depth of middling-class consumerism. Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life looks at how consumers made meaning out of the objects we can count in broad statistical analysis.That quantitative analysis without the daily lives behind it will only ~ 199 ~

A Nation of Shoppers ever be static. Dwelling, moving about, speaking, reading, shopping, and cooking are all conducted within tactical rules, but also contain the possibility of surprises. De Certeau argues that the private space inhabited by the same person for a certain time become a type of portrait of the persona. While a domestic interior can convey an income level, or at least ambitions to a lifestyle and income, a person’s way of organizing the space composes a ‘life narrative’, the domestic space conveys fragments of a family saga.¹ All of these aspects of spaces and objects in the past are conveyed for us now in life testimonies: diaries, memoirs, autobiographies, and the texts and bequests of wills.

William Hutton and James Bisset William Hutton, a generation before James Bisset, came to Birmingham after an impoverished childhood working in the Derby silk mill and in an apprenticeship as a stockinger. He found his way into the Birmingham middling classes when he moved there in 1750 and set up a book shop. He bought his first books in 1746: three volumes of the Gentleman’s Magazine with no bindings. He learned to bind the books from the ‘shabby bookseller’ he dealt with, and later bought his tools from him. His purchases before this were confined to clothes, and in 1743, a bell harp, followed by a dulcimer he made for himself. When he ran off from his apprenticeship at the age of 17 his possessions consisted of a new suit of clothes including a coat and best hat, and in his bag some food, a new bible, one shirt, a pair of stockings, ‘my best wig, carefully folded and laid at top’. The bag was stolen. He commented on how he had cherished his clothes: ‘I made shift . . . with a little overwork, and a little credit, to raise a genteel suit of clothes, fully adequate to the sphere in which I moved. The girls eyed me with some attention; nay I eyed myself as much as any of them.’² As soon as he could save the money he bought a silver watch. These were significant personal possessions: a young man’s fashionable clothes, the watch which signified manhood, and the bell harp, dulcimer, and books which conveyed his longing to escape the straitened life of a failing artisan. His possessions led him into the opportunities available in the relatively unconstrained society of Birmingham’s rapidly growing consumer industries. ¹ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, vol. i (Berkeley, 1984), 35–40; vol. ii (Minneapolis, 1998), 145–7. ² Life of William Hutton, with introduction by Carl Chinn (Birmingham, 1998), 18. Also see The Life of William Hutton to which is Subjoined the History of his Family Written by Himself and Published by C. Hutton (London, 1816).

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes He attributed to his new clothes his meeting the printer, William Rylands; his interest in books also no doubt played a part. James Bisset, who was introduced in the last chapter, also came to Birmingham as a youth, but thirty years later in 1776. His background was utterly different. Not seeking an escape from the poverty of the declining artisan, he was sent by his modestly affluent Scottish family of merchants, academics, and lawyers to be trained in the new semi-luxury industries or merchant sector of Birmingham. He described the clothes he arrived in: ‘a light blue coat, and white casimere waistcoat, and small clothes; a shirt with deep laced frill and lace ruffles . . . a small stock with a brilliant stock buckle; white silk stockings, and a pair of latchet shoes with oblong silver buckles. My hat was of a neat three-square cock, and every boy then, that was well dressed, had his cane and tassel, of which mine, which was goldheaded, and the present of my elder brother, formed a most prominent feature.’³ After an apprenticeship to a japanner at a premium of £40, Bisset experienced the many ups and downs of a journeyman’s life in a new consumer sector. These included family financial troubles and deaths which cut off capital for access to setting up as a master japanner, and the death of his master, which left him on the street, and in debt for £20 (the value of the clothes he owned). But inventing a new finishing process of painting on glass opened new chances for high earnings, and as a young man he could earn a guinea an hour. Bisset brought books with him to Birmingham, bought more when he could, and was proud of the small library he accumulated during his apprenticeship. The clothes and books which dominated the young man’s preoccupations gave way to other concerns as Hutton, then Bisset, married and had children. Hutton in 1750 set up a bookshop, and rented a house for £8 a year. He married the niece of a neighbour; his wife shortly after inherited her uncle’s substantial house, and together with his house he now had house, business premises, and a warehouse. By 1758, along with his furnishings he valued his assets at £777. He bought land over the following years, and ten years later counted his worth at £2,000. During the Birmingham riots in July 1791, he wrote of how the entire furnishings of his two houses had been burnt by the mob. ‘I write this narrative in a house without furniture, without a roof, door, chimney-piece, window or window frame.’⁴ ³ Memoir of James Bisset, 71. The full MS is at Warwick County Record Office, CR1563/246. ⁴ Life of William Hutton, 43–53; Catherine Hutton, A Narrative of the Riots in Birmingham, July, 1791 (Birmingham, 1875).

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A Nation of Shoppers

Fig. 6.1. William Hutton. The University of Warwick Library.

Fig. 6.2. James Bisset. The Bodleian Library.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes James Bisset saved assiduously for his marriage to a woman related to a local family of the lesser gentry. He valued the buttons on his wedding coat at 16 guineas; he had painted them himself. He rented his first house for £8 a year; it had a parlour, kitchen, cellar and brewhouse, two chambers, and an attic.⁵ After the birth of their third child Bisset and his family moved to a bigger house on the same street, and now paid 16 guineas a year for five bedrooms, a parlour, sitting room, kitchen, and garden. Bisset did not mention furnishing the house, but did discuss the display of his collection of curiosities, which soon became a museum taking up several rooms in the house. His collection, rather more than his growing family, prompted another move to a large house in the town centre, in New Street where he also opened a shop ‘in the fancy line, and in petrification ornaments, into which I introduced curious devices of my own invention’. His house was now also a museum, open to the public. Bisset’s growing prosperity was always tenuous; despite his own and his wife’s smaller gentry background, and her inheritance, he always considered himself a part of the industrial middling classes. He apprenticed one son to a Birmingham glassmaker, another went to Liverpool to find a trade, but then went to sea, and his daughters taught at a girls’ boarding school. He expressed his vulnerability to the volatile consumer markets on which he depended: Trade now became very bad and money extremely scarce. I had a large stock of goods, a heavy house rent, increasing taxes and increasing demands, poor levies almost every other week, whilst every article of consumption was rapidly rising in the markets. I had never been extravagant and my wife had never been improvident, we could, therefore, make no retrenchments.⁶

Hutton and Bisset, both from different backgrounds, took advantage of the open economy offered by Birmingham’s new consumer industries. They became its producers, its retailers, writers, and celebrants, and were themselves the middling class and domestic consumers of the new British semi-luxuries. Changing consumer practices in the eighteenth century were led by the middling classes. This diverse and highly differentiated group wielded disproportionate influence on wider consumer habits. Who were these consumers, and what aspirations and motivations affected their behaviour? Can we identify a new consumerism within these groups, and did women participate in consumption to a different extent and in distinct ways from men? Were women really the sirens of consumption once heralded by Neil ⁵ Memoir of James Bisset, 74–7.

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⁶ Ibid. 82.

A Nation of Shoppers McKendrick?⁷ Our knowledge of eighteenth-century consumers is fragmented and piecemeal, much of it based in the family papers, diaries, and extensive correspondence of wealthy landed elites and gentry or the urban mercantile bourgeoisie.⁸ We know something of the possessions of a much wider group of the middling classes, but little of the desires and actions that lay behind the material culture they left. Consumer goods need to be set alongside their imagined consumers. With a view to the diversity and range of incomes across this group, we need to follow the responsiveness of various parts of the middling classes to new, expressive, and fashionable goods.This means identifying possessions, and the timing and the depth of their uptake. But beyond this we want to know how the new goods were used and displayed, and what they meant in codes of politeness and self-respect. The new goods fostered changes in scene settings—parlours and dining rooms in even small houses became dedicated spaces with cabinets, alcoves, fireplace mantelpieces, and special furnishings for display. Rituals of social engagement crossing the private/public divide in turn stimulated new interpretations of the goods and further innovation in products. The rapid take-up and special responsiveness of the middling groups to new goods must be related to opportunities perceived in the goods for fashion, individuality, and personal choice as much as for more traditional motives of status and belonging. Were motivations as much about gender as they were about social identities? There are the widely recognized stereoptyes: ‘the man of taste takes pleasure in the esteem of his fellows; the woman of fashion pleases more than herself ’. These gendered behavioural traits became constructed in the goods themselves; the products appeared to carry characteristics of special appeal to their male or female buyers. While the stereotypes abound, many of them have been about women, and these in turn were frequently a far cry from actual family and household practices. Men’s acquisitiveness for new consumer goods is as yet relatively unexplored. We shall see how many found in the new goods signs of male respectability and independence. While fashion clothing spoke to one kind of aspiration, acquiring new decorative ware provided clear markers of manhood and femininity. ⁷ Neil McKendrick, ‘Home Demand and Economic Growth: A New View of Women and Children in the Industrial Revolution’, in McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society (Cambridge, 1974), 152–210. ⁸ See e.g. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter (New Haven, 1998).

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The Middling Classes: Who Were They? The behaviour of the elites and the middling classes is frequently difficult to disentangle. Much of what we know of eighteenth-century consumerism is taken from accounts of the lives of the elites, not so much wealthy aristocrats as lesser gentry, wealthy merchants, better-off professionals, and literary figures. But more significantly, an interplay of elite and middling groups was underpinned by a code of politeness which conveyed a vision of accessible gentility right across these groups. Historical claims to middling-class influence rely first on numbers and wealth, and secondly on the rapid development of the metropolis and provincial towns. There was an upscaling of expenditure over the course of the century as elites sought out symbols of distinction at the same time as access to landed and especially aristocratic status became more difficult. Politeness, civility, and taste became social markers more significant than material wealth, and as conventions of lifestyle they demanded socially acceptable consumer expenditure on country houses, furnishings, durables and clothing, servants, and leisure.⁹ Civilized conduct, taste, aesthetics, and deportment conveyed affluence. Conveying status and distinction, not just through material wealth, but through symbols of taste and refinement was a long-standing feature of urban societies with substantial mercantile elites and middling classes. The wealthy of Ming China and Renaissance Italy developed rituals of eating and drinking together with a private life of domestic interiors. A material culture of porcelain, fine glassware, maiolica, artwork, fabrics, and furnishings underpinned the rituals, customs, and social encounters.¹⁰ The value of many of these goods consisted mainly of the cost of the craft labour that went into their making, and not in the value of their materials. This feature continued to dominate the spending habits of the wealthy in eighteenthcentury England, as we have seen, as preferences shifted towards lightweight ornamental silver and Sheffield plate, and away from silver whose value was determined only by its sterling worth.¹¹ Distinction for the wealthy before and just after the sixteenth century relied on ‘patina’, a sign of the right sort of duration in the social life of ⁹ Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford, 1989), 61–71, 574–82. ¹⁰ Clunas, Superfluous Things; Craig Clunas, ‘Modernity Global and Local: Consumption and the Rise of the West’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 1497–511; Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy, 176–255; Evelyn Welch, Art in Renaissance Italy (Oxford, 1997), 275–311. ¹¹ Clifford, ‘A Commerce with Things’.

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A Nation of Shoppers things. The cult of the durable consumer good was about family status, and patina was conveyed to objects through surviving family use for several generations. Patina was thus a sign and guarantee of social standing. But whereas earlier in the period families conveyed dynasty through possession of old and recycled furnishings, or at least those made to look old, by the eighteenth century many jettisoned their inherited movables.¹² Rapid fashion changes in housing styles and interiors demanded the services not just of architects but of ‘upholders’, an early form of interior designer.¹³ From the eighteenth century, too, aesthetic and stylistic considerations took precedence over utilitarian ones. Goods that once conveyed status through their patina, now carried it through their novelty, fashion, and taste.

The Middling Classes and the Towns Thorstein Veblen and Georg Simmel analysed the conspicuous consumption of the rich as the motor driving wider consumer trends. They associated this with Sombart’s luxury; it was individual, hedonistic and pleasure seeking, and driven by irrational fantastic desires.¹⁴ Simmel’s ‘trickle down’ theory and Veblen’s theory of emulation were used rather uncritically by historians to convey the wider social impact of the consumerism of the rich. McKendrick used the examples provided by Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood, who sought out wealthy customers as ‘legislators of taste’. Both made commemorative issues of goods for royal birthdays, and sent new patterns to members of the aristocracy. They then produced similar commodities in a variety of cheaper materials accessible to all levels of society. ‘The variety of the great will ever be affecting new modes, in order to increase that notice to which it thinks itself exclusively entitled. The lower ranks will imitate them as soon as they have discovered the innovation.’¹⁵ But social emulation is a facile behavioural explanation. Consumer response must be connected to incomes, and to the metropolitan or provincial town and country spaces where groups ranging from small tradesmen to lesser gentry ¹² On patina see McCracken, Culture and Consumption, 5–22. On medieval and early modern perceptions of inherited goods see Martha Howell, ‘Fixing Movables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai’, Past and Present, 150 (1996), 3–45; Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture 1500–1800 (New Haven, 2002), 67–70. ¹³ McCracken, Culture and Consumption, 5–22; Matthew Craske and Maxine Berg,‘Art and Industry: The Making of Modern Luxury in Eighteenth Century Britain’, in Economia e arte, Proceedings of the Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica ‘F.Datini’ (Prato), 33 (2002), 823–36. ¹⁴ Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism; Daniel Miller, ‘Consumption as the Vanguard of History’, in Miller (ed.), Acknowledging Consumption, 1–57, pp. 26–7. ¹⁵ Robinson, ‘Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood’, 98–114; McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb (eds.), The Birth of a Consumer Society.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes made their lives. Though similar objects might have been bought or owned across these social groups, the meanings and significance attached to the goods were often very different. Incomes for the gentry ranged from £200–300 up to the wealthiest with incomes close to £5,000, and their lifestyles varied accordingly. By 1790 there were about 800 gentry families with £5,000 and 3,000 to 4,000 with incomes of £1,000 to £3,000, with another 15,000 gentlemen living on a few hundred pounds a year. Their heaviest expenditures were housing conversions and servants; the prosperous gentry paid wages for between twelve and twenty servants per year.¹⁶ The prestigious London livery companies such as the Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Fishmongers, in the early eighteenth-century century, recruited sons of the gentry who did not thereby lose their gentility. The early eighteenth-century merchant had become a responsible and sober citizen with respectable morals and manners: ‘Trading formerly rendered a Gentleman ignoble; now an ignoble person makes himself by merchandizing as good as a gentleman.’ The incomes and expenditure of many within the gentry and wealthier members of middling classes were not so different. The higher levels of the mercantile and commercial classes in London or Bristol were able to top £10,000 through long-distance trade, wholesaling, finance, real estate, industry, and office holding. Joseph Massie’s survey in the 1730s found merchants divided into three expenditure groups: those spending £600, a group spending £400, and another £200 per year. He thought most of London’s merchants fell within the top two categories.¹⁷ Such wealthy merchants in the early eighteenth century displayed their gentlemanly behaviour in walking through city streets, visits, and regular forays to the coffee house. Among the most celebrated were The Grecian, in Devereux Court (in the Strand) or Will’s in Covent Garden (on Russell Street). Richard Steele in the Tatler depicted the City merchant with the ‘Equipage and Appointment’ of ‘a private Gentleman’. ‘But Wealth and Wisdom are Possessions too solemn not to give Weariness to active minds . . . This Emperor therefore, with great Regularity, every Day at Five in the Afternoon, leaves his Money-Changers, his Publicans, and little Hoarders of Wealth, to their low Pursuits, and ascends his Chariot to drive to Will’s; where the Tast is refin’d, and a Relish given to Men’s Possessions, by a polite Skill in gratifying their Passions and Appetites.’¹⁸ ¹⁶ John Burnett, A History of the Cost of Living (Harmondsworth, 1969), 151, 154. ¹⁷ Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (London, 1989), 8, 269 n. 167. ¹⁸ Cited in Lawrence E. Klein, ‘The Polite Town: Shifting Possibilities of Urbanness, 1660–1714’, in Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (eds.), The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink (London, 2003), 27–39, p. 37.

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A Nation of Shoppers The most common criteria for membership of the middling classes in the mid-eighteenth century were minimum incomes of £40–50 per year, and liability for payment of the poor rates. On the basis of income, these numbers ranged from one- to two-fifths of the population; poor-rate payers in some large towns might be 30 per cent of the population. There was a shift in incomes towards the middling groups over the last half of the eighteenth century, so that those with incomes between £50 and £400 rose from 15 per cent of the population to 25 per cent of the population. Birmingham in the late eighteenth century had 4,000 houses paying the poor rate out of a total of 11,000.¹⁹ The middling classes were most closely associated with towns and cities. Towns were the locus for knowledge, refinement, and pleasure. They flock into cities; love to receive and communicate knowledge; to show their wit or their breeding; their taste in conversation or living, in clothes or furniture. Curiosity allures the wise; vanity the foolish; and pleasure both.²⁰

At the beginning of the eighteenth century 20 to 25 per cent of English people lived in towns of some description. Over half of these lived in small centres of less than 5,000, but by 1750 between 15 and 21 per cent of the population as a whole lived in towns of over 5,000 people. By 1801 this proportion had risen to 27.5 per cent. London was the epicentre. By 1700 it had 11 per cent of the total national population, it was also the largest city in Europe. London is often the focus of discussion of the middling class and of consumer cultures. Indeed there were certainly higher proportions of those with middling incomes living there than in other parts of the country. The metropolis, though the centre for elite expenditure, could claim in 1798 to have only 2–3 per cent of its population in the upper income brackets, that is with average incomes of £200 a year; 16 to 21 per cent of its middling brackets claimed £80 to £139 a year, and the remaining 75 per cent was made up of a diverse body of small shopkeepers, small independent artisans, wage labourers, and the unemployed. While the percentages of high-income families living in London were relatively small, these families nevertheless exerted a disproportionate im¹⁹ P. H. Lindert and J. G. Williamson, ‘Revising England’s Social Tables, 1688–1812’, Explorations in Economic History, 19 (1982), 395–408; William Hutton, An History of Birmingham (3rd edn., Birmingham, 1795), 99. ²⁰ ‘Of Luxury’, ch. 14 of David Hume, Political Essays (1752); rev. and published in 1760 as ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’. For a recent standard edn. see Hume, Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), 268–80, p. 271.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes pact on the development of the city between the end of the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. Where earlier London was virtually two separate cities, Westminster in the west, and the City of London in the east, by later in the century the West End was developing rapidly with housing booms in the 1680s, the 1710s, and the 1720s. There were 4,000 aristocratic and gentry families living in London in 1700, on financial transfers from country properties; they stimulated the London season, that round of theatre and opera going, balls, masquerades, and assemblies, visiting, shopping, and club attendance which brought yet more of the elite classes to the metropolis for much of the winter and spring.²¹ They stayed, when they came, in squares of compact terrace houses with a dozen or more furnished rooms which could be leased or rented. Crossing into these groups were London’s big bourgeoisie of merchants, bankers, and wholesale traders, probably another 4,000 early in the century. London also had between a quarter and a third of all the English attorneys and solicitors and most of the barristers.This whole elite group accounted for approximately 12 per cent of taxpayers in the 1750s.²² Below this elite there were many other groups who, though they counted themselves among the middling orders, might fall either side of the great divide identified by Langford between polite society and the rest. Langford conveys contemporary perceptions of the division in the London parish of Whitechapel in 1734: ‘ “a class composed of Gentlemen of Fortune, Sense, Reputation and good Manners” together with “Tradesmen of good Credit, great Dealings, and most commonly, of good Understanding.” These men did not serve parish offices, but they were the elite of Whitechapel. On the other side were “Tradesmen of lower Degree, such as Artificers, Carpenters, Bricklayers, Glasiers and Painters etc.” who did occupy parish offices, and “a large unruly Herd of Men” below them who were substantial enough to be ratepayers, but were the terror of the parochial vestry.’²³ The spa towns and, later in the century, the seaside pleasure towns formed another focus for elite and middling-class consumers. Together with London, it is the spas that have attracted most historical research on urban consumption.These centres too were built to respond to the rhythms of the season; the health resort was just becoming the fashionable place to be. Bath appeared to be an extension of elite London, a retreat during the ²¹ Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford, 2000), 419, 428. ²² Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800 (Oxford, 2000). ²³ Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 75.

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A Nation of Shoppers summer parliamentary recess, and an accessible diversion for contemporary celebrities from the theatre, the arts, and politics, as well as their groupies, connectors, and endless admirers. But the thing about these new resorts was that they were not London; they were places of holiday not work, of more relaxed sociability than London or county society, and they were smaller, making encounters across social groups and the sexes easier. They were immensely popular not just with the elite, but with the middling classes. A building boom in Bath early in the century went with an Assembly Room, the Pump room, a playhouse, and a ballroom. The population of Bath rose from 3,000 at the beginning of the century to 35,000 at the end, making it the twelfth largest town in England. Its fashionable visitors spent £60,000 a year on inns and lodgings at the beginning of the century, and 12,000 visitors descended on it each season in the middle of the century.²⁴ These were certainly not all elite sojourners. The middling classes in all their diversity formed a substantial portion of the new residents and the visitors.²⁵ Bath was the place where the latest trend-setting designs and products were to be found. China and toy sellers had sophisticated shops and galleries, and displayed their latest and their best there, for this was the place where they could catch the attention of buyers on holiday or in relaxation from the routines of everyday life, be it at work or in the rounds of social and charitable duty. Smaller spas in other parts of the country had a long pedigree. Celia Fiennes went to Tunbridge Wells where she took the waters, liked the gentry society there and ‘the shopps full of all sorts of toys, silver, china, milliners, and all sorts of curious ware . . . besides . . . two large Coffee houses for Tea Chocolate etc., and two rooms for the Lottery and Hazard board’.²⁶ Others joined Tunbridge, round the coast, in the midlands and the north: Beverley, Lichfield, Warwick, Ludlow, and Stamford. All these Georgian gentry towns now added to the amenities of brick housing developments, newspapers, and piped water further attractions to residents and visitors: assembly rooms, shops, entertainments, and race courses. Epsom, Buxton, Harrogate, Margate, Cheltenham, Matlock, and Lyme Regis held similar attractions for visitors. These were not only spas and holiday centres for those of the local elites and middling classes. They attracted large numbers of middling-class tourists and travellers who came with the improvement in ²⁴ Clark, British Clubs, 106, 147; E. A. Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth and Agricultural Change: England and the Continent in the Early Modern Period’, in E. A. Wrigley, People, Cities and Wealth: The Transformation of Traditional Society (Oxford, 1987), 157–93, p. 164. ²⁵ Clark, British Clubs, 106–8. ²⁶ Journeys of Celia Fiennes 1662–1741, ed. Jonathan Hillaby (London, 1983), 152–3.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes road transport after the middle of the century, and the new fashion for touring within the British Isles.²⁷ Regional political centres such as Edinburgh and county and cathedral towns such as York attracted court, gentry, and literary culture, professional, legal, and medical services. Edinburgh had approximately 90,000 inhabitants at the end of the eighteenth century, with 13,000 houses assessed at £20 or more, and in 1777 200 masters and mistresses were taxed on the male servants they employed.²⁸ York grew at a modest pace from 12,000 in 1700 to 17,000 in 1801. York had a fashionable season lasting most of the winter; the Yorkshire gentry made the town their winter residence. Samuel Richardson wrote of the town in 1742: ‘the present support of the city is chiefly owing to the gentry who make it their winter residence . . . And as the inhabitants abound with the conveniencies of life, they likewise partake of its diversions, there being plays, assemblies, music-meetings, or some entertainments, every night in the week.’²⁹ While much of the focus on elite and middling-class consumption has been directed to London and a few spa towns, notably Bath, the most startling growth of the middling classes, along with urban growth more generally, was happening outside London. There were said to be 170,000 urban middling people in 1700, but 475,000 in 1801, and these figures do not even include small country towns and suburban clusters. While many of these towns specialized with the growth of industry in their regions, they also diversified as they grew, leading the expansion of urban and consumer culture. In England, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and Manchester carried forward a new dynamic of modernity based in provincial and industrial enlightenment. They were not poorer copies of London, but distinctive centres of intellectual ferment, industrial and scientific innovation, and provincial and regional pride. There were large numbers of relatively new industrial and mercantile towns, and they grew at a hectic rate, especially in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, and Leeds quadrupled their populations in the last fifty years of the eighteenth century. Not only did these towns burst through the earlier urban dynamic, but their example was unprecedented in Europe. In Scotland, Glasgow grew nearly ²⁷ Peter Clark, ‘Small Towns 1700–1840’, in Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 2000), vol. ii, ch. 22, 751–2; cf. Sweet, ‘Topographies of Politeness’, 355–70. ²⁸ Stana Nenadic, ‘Middle-Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720–1840’, Past and Present, 145 (1994), 122–57, 126. ²⁹ J. Jefferson Looney, ‘Cultural Life in the Provinces: Leeds and York 1720–1820’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (eds.), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), 483–510, p. 488.

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A Nation of Shoppers as quickly as Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, rising from 13,000 in 1700 to 24,000 in 1750 and up to 77,000 in 1800, indeed outranking Birmingham’s population over the whole period.³⁰ But merchants, shopkeepers, manufacturers and craftsmen, lawyers, and professionals made up a relatively low proportion of its residents, 15 per cent in 1800.³¹ The remarkable growth of these towns was not an isolated occurrence, but was bolstered by the equally rapid growth of surrounding medium and smaller-scale towns. Towns from Wolverhampton and Leicester to Warrington and Stockport became themselves major contenders; the smaller urban centres doubled their populations over the eighteenth century, and grew at more than four times the national aggregate.³² On Scotland’s east coast, Dundee and Aberdeen quadrupled their populations over the century, and by 1800 ranked with Newcastle, Hull, and Nottingham.³³ All of these towns had not only industry, and the substantial capitalist, managerial, artisan, and tradesmen groups that underpinned it, but large retail, service, administrative, and professional groups. And there were major building booms in all these centres in the later eighteenth century.³⁴ The growth of the middling classes was, therefore, not just urban, it was provincial. All of these centres grew faster than London, and their social structures shifted more rapidly.That middling class which grew from one in seven in the early eighteenth century to one in four or five in the early nineteenth century was bolstered from largely urban-living merchants and financiers, the professions, the administrative and military personnel proliferating with the country’s wars and imperial enterprise, and the building, retailing, and consumer goods production accompanying urban and wider population growth. England’s newer and now large industrial towns were, however, no sudden appearance on the landscape at the end of the eighteenth century. They gathered their populations in a long sweep from the late seventeenth century. Birmingham stands out as an indicator of a phase of industrialcommercial expansion from the early eighteenth century, based in international and especially imperial markets and new consumer goods production. ³⁰ Maxine Berg, ‘Commerce and Creativity in Eighteenth-Century Birmingham’, in M. Berg (ed.), Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe (London, 1991), 173–204, p. 178; T. M. Devine, ‘The Urban Crisis’, in T. M. Devine and Gordon Jackson (eds.), Glasgow, i: Beginnings to 1830 (Manchester, 1995), 402–16, p. 406; Stana Nenadic, ‘The Middle Ranks and Modernisation’, in Devine and Jackson, ibid. 278–311. ³¹ Nenadic, ‘The Middle Ranks’, 279. ³² Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth’, 163. ³³ Berg, ‘Commerce and Creativity’, 178. ³⁴ C. W. Chalklin, The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study of the Building Process 1740–1820 (London, 1974), 274.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes It made the goods for the middling classes, and it attracted broadly middling-class migrants along with a workforce for widely diverse industries and commercial activities. Its really rapid period of growth was in the early eighteenth century, and by 1750 it led Manchester and Liverpool with its rise in population to 24,000, from 7,000 at the beginning of the century. Certainly it grew again to 74,000 by the end of the century, but it was by then outflanked by its northern rivals. Glasgow, one of those northern rivals, by contrast, grew more rapidly in the latter half of the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century. Its middle ranks made up a disproportionately low proportion of its population, in comparison with other British towns; and fewer of these owned luxury goods. Glasgow could claim only 663 houses valued at a £20 annual rental or above in 1798; by 1814 there were 1,818 such houses. There were only 25 privately owned carriages in Glasgow as late as 1785. Indeed Dorothy Wordsworth, on a visit in 1803, was intrigued: ‘one thing must strike every stranger in his first walk through Glasgow—an appearance of business and bustle, but no coaches or gentlemen’s carriages; during all the time we walked in the streets I only saw three carriages, and these were travelling chaises.’³⁵ But equally the city by 1800 claimed large numbers of new craft occupations supplying non-essential consumer goods and services. Never as wealthy as neighbouring Edinburgh, its West India and Atlantic merchants and wealthy manufacturers were the new rich, keen to reinvent themselves through conspicuous consumption.³⁶ Birmingham, also commercial, mercantile, and industrial, moved rapidly to the forefront of Britain’s consumer goods production. It focused from early in the century on international, European, and colonial markets; its industries were largely export and consumer goods industries. It concentrated on transport and financial links to London and the nation. Its merchants and manufacturers perceived themselves at a nodal point of national communications and transport. As Samuel Garbett, Birmingham’s leading parliamentary lobbyist, put it: ‘instead of allowing speculators to make partial patches as private jobs; inland navigation should be considered a national political object’. And the real priority was a direct connection with London. After the Coventry canal’s connection with the Trent and Mersey canal in 1785, the next five years saw canals linking Lancashire to the midlands and the Thames.³⁷ Birmingham was also a financial centre, indeed so wellendowed with banks that the west midlands had a lower ratio of population to bank offices than any other region in England including London. These ³⁵ Nenadic, ‘The Middle Ranks’, 281. ³⁷ Berg, ‘Commerce and Creativity’, 182.

³⁶ Nenadic, ‘Middle-Rank Consumers’, 127.

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A Nation of Shoppers

Fig. 6.3. Birmingham: japanned tray with view of Birmingham. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

banks, moreover, were not local providers of industrial capital; they addressed a wider commercial world. We can best imagine the dramatic impact made by such towns as Birmingham and Sheffield if we think of the heady reconstruction and reinvention of those same towns over our own last decade. Birmingham, which by the mid-eighteenth century had risen to the first ranks of British towns and cities, had the most distinctively new middling groups. These spanned the industrial, financial, mercantile, and professional groups.There was close interaction among these groups; a large group of industrial producers of middling wealth provided a counterpoint to a cosmopolitan industrial and financial elite. Towns like Birmingham and Sheffield which have been so closely identified by historians with industry, and indeed heavy industry, had a much more diverse social structure than we have imagined. Among those leaving wills over the course of the eighteenth century, only approximately 25 per cent were from the metal trades; Sheffield was more specialized with 41 per cent. Birmingham’s retail, service, and clothing sectors were at least as large as its metal manufacturing sector. Indeed there ~ 214 ~

Men and Women of the Middling Classes were more drapers than edge-tool makers and more shoemakers and tailors than gun and pistol makers or brass-founders. Birmingham’s and Sheffield’s manufacturers, moreover, were predominantly a property-owning smallproducer and middling-class group. They were not just producers, but were themselves consumers of housing and durable consumer goods. Birmingham had a lot of shops; they paid a combined shop tax from 1786 to 1789 that was twice the whole amount levied per year for Cheshire.³⁸ Most of the metalworkers of these towns who left wills and insurance policies were property owners, including a substantial group with multiple properties, and had goods in these properties valued at over £100.They were also much more prominently involved in the property market than were those in the Nottingham and Manchester textile industries. To be sure, most of this property was small housing fostered by building clubs and building societies, or rented out to other artisans. But the range of housing built also reflected the diversity of the manufacturing social structure. Alongside Birmingham’s and Sheffield’s small and medium-scale producers was a proportion of 8 to 12 per cent insuring their properties and goods for over £1,000. Some of these manufacturers from the middle of the century had the latest purpose-built industrial works employing several hundred workers, and a number built their homes outside the town and sought out social connections with landed and gentry society.³⁹ The manufacturers were, moreover, not the only ones to claim such assets. While the button makers and toy manufacturers of Birmingham had the largest number of insurance policies for over £5,000 between 1775 and 1787, some with valuations of £7,000, it was the mercers, drapers, and haberdashers who formed the largest group with policies of £1,000 and more.⁴⁰ Hutton expressed his pride in the town to which he, like so many other young men on the make, had migrated, when he declared: ‘when the word Birmingham occurs, a superb picture instantly expands in the mind, which is best explained by the other words grand, populous, extensive, active, commercial and humane’.⁴¹ But there was more to this proud assertion than his own local identity. The special dynamism of these new industrial towns went with a rising middling class benefiting from rapid local economic success. They were producers, inventors, wholesalers, and creditors and formed their own ³⁸ Hopkins, Birmingham, 66–9. ³⁹ Maxine Berg, ‘Small Producer Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century England’, Business History, 35 (1993), 17–39. ⁴⁰ Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Property and the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 24 (1993), 233–50, p. 237; Hopkins, Birmingham, 66–9. ⁴¹ Cited in Joyce Ellis, ‘Regional and County Centres 1700–1840’, in Clark (ed.), Cambridge Urban History, ii, 673–704, p. 696.

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A Nation of Shoppers emerging middling-class consumer culture. But the middling classes of these new more specialist industrial towns were only one side of the story. Other more traditional regional centres and county towns had their own middling-class clientele, both residents and those from the surrounding hinterland. If we compare Birmingham to Bristol, the other major commercial mercantile town which grew most rapidly in the first half of the eighteenth century, we see a town that was twice the size of Birmingham in 1750 with its 50,000 inhabitants, but by 1800 had only grown to 60,000, a mere 80 per cent of Birmingham’s size. But the town, from early in the eighteenth century, was closely integrated into the wider consumer culture. Those assessed up to 1740 with wealth of £166 or more owned a whole array of consumer goods, and many small shopkeepers and artisans assessed with less than £40 in wealth lived in houses with several rooms, and displayed prints and pictures, chinaware, and silver.⁴² Exeter and Shrewsbury, York and Chester had quality shopping facilities to offer, and, by later in the eighteenth century, boasted the attraction of lower mortality rates and less crowded streets than Bristol, Leeds, and Manchester. The small towns, too, continued to hold large proportions of the population. If we measure these as places with less than 5,000 inhabitants, then 54 per cent of England’s urban dwellers in the early eighteenth century lived in such places, and not in London, the spas, the county towns, or England’s dynamic new industrial centres.⁴³ Over the course of the century industrial development spawned more of these regional centres in a constellation around larger towns; the pottery towns focused on Burslem and Newcastle are one example; Birmingham’s, Manchester’s, and Liverpool’s urban hinterlands are others. The Universal British Directory in the 1790s listed 325 small towns, and over half of these, especially in the west midlands and the north-west, had a spectrum of consumer activities. Some that were also market towns had clubs, and occasional plays or assemblies, and all had shops. Their decline came in the nineteenth century. It coincided with the attractions of bigger centres elsewhere and the means of getting to them by road and railway, as well as with the local collapse of crafts and proto-industrial activities and rural poverty.⁴⁴ Britain’s distinctively high urban population contained a full range of middling-class groups from the extremely wealthy to very vulnerable ⁴² See Berg, ‘Commerce and Creativity’, 178; Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England, 138–40. ⁴³ Hoppit, Land of Liberty, 419. ⁴⁴ Clark, ‘Small Towns’, 758.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes tradespeople. These provided the bulk of the consumers for her new goods; the concentration of shops, markets, and pedlars in the town also provided the display of goods, and conveyed their consumption and their use to artisans and the labouring classes. Ubiquitous shops throughout smaller and larger centres—one to every forty inhabitants—provided a middling-class clientele in itself.The shopkeepers formed a powerful lobby in many towns. Even towns that did not join the big players of the new industrial era became shopping centres, displaying their superior retail environment, and attracting significant wealth; shopkeepers formed a principal occupational group of Chester and Gloucester. Their houses, not infrequently substantial, had all the latest consumer goods, clocks, pictures, and new furniture.⁴⁵ While the large newer industrial and commercial towns as well as the medium-scale industrial and county centres had distinctive regional middle classes, there was also a sense in which all sought some replication of London’s amenities. By the 1760s most of the larger towns were connected to London by coach, and there was a national network of turnpike roads by 1770. Not just large-scale house building, but urban improvement changed their outlook over the period. Most had a cultural quarter; there were paved streets and rebuilt civic buildings, as well as assembly rooms, coffee houses, enclosed walks, and pleasure gardens. Street lighting appeared in Norwich and Bristol after 1700, and other towns followed suit. Above all there were large numbers of shopkeepers whose shop premises and houses displayed a polite consumer culture across the full range of the middling orders. The population of many of these towns was young and mobile. Bachelors aged from 15 to 30 made up just over 30 per cent of the male population over the age 15 in Lichfield in 1695, while they were under a quarter of the full age group in the total population.⁴⁶ There was a ready supply of housing, inns, public houses, and lodging houses for the short-term visitor. This was the background against which a highly mobile and rapidly transforming middling class learned to consume. That consumption was both public and private, and carried with it aspirations for belonging and self-respect as well as personal identity. The young men who came to the burgeoning towns of the midlands and the north made their first contacts at taverns, inns, alehouses, and coffee houses. These provided drinking rooms and guestrooms as well as other public rooms, all furnished with clocks, pictures, china and glassware, silver, pewter, and brassware. The clubs which met in these premises or had their own meeting rooms acquired a ⁴⁵ Clark, British Clubs, 153.

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⁴⁶ Ibid. 204.

A Nation of Shoppers paraphernalia of furnishings from candles and candelabra to bookcases, paintings, and symbolic objects. These public/private venues helped to create an urban consumer culture among young migrants, and wider sectors of the middling classes and the elites who spent large portions of their lives in lodgings or clubs as they moved between country residence and towns or between towns.⁴⁷ The cafés, bars, restaurants, and dance clubs which today mark out the rebuilding of Britain’s old industrial centres and her northern and midlands cities cater to a similarly upwardly and geographically mobile and youthful middling-class clientele. Venture capital, knowledge clusters, and the relocation of head offices of national and international firms have brought a young and prosperous clientele into these heartlands of twentieth-century industrial decline. Juxtaposed to areas of extreme deprivation, these enclaves of rebirth and expansion cannot be so very different from the social settings of those rapidly growing commercial and industrial towns of the eighteenth century. Young men on the make, seeking their fortune, or if not that, then an escape from the beckoning poverty of declining trades or the stifling expectations of traditional professions, might meet contacts and find friends and lodgings in clubs, societies, and other public meeting places. But respectable dress and behaviour were all important in setting them apart from the labouring poor. The shops, schools, multi-purpose lending libraries, agencies, and lodging houses set up by energetic businesswomen catered to the specific needs of bustling new towns, with their incomers, travellers, and tourists.⁴⁸ The new consumerism was made in such places. James Bisset attended clubs, taverns, and a lodge, ran a circulating library on Sundays, and was an avid theatre-goer at Birmingham’s two theatres in the later eighteenth century. I had long enjoyed the society of a select number of friends, and of a social club, who met every Wednesday at Vauxhall, for the purpose of playing a friendly rubber at whist. We went regularly at three o’clock in the afternoon, the dinner hour in general at Birmingham being at one, and coaches came for the seniors at half-past eight o’clock in the evening. We took coffee and tea; brandy and rum were always on the table and regularly ordered.

But family life altered his habits, and he turned to spending more of his time at home. ⁴⁷ Clark, British Clubs, 163–4; Pamela Sharpe, ‘Population and Society 1700–1840’, in Clark (ed.), Cambridge Urban History, vol. ii, ch. 15, esp. pp. 491–528. ⁴⁸ See Christine Wiskin, ‘Businesswomen in Birmingham’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Warwick.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes I had determined to break myself of staying out late, or of even going much into company. I accordingly accustomed myself to spend most of my evenings at home in my own happy and domestic circle.⁴⁹

Sociability among these middling groups, more focused on domestic spaces from the later years of the century, demanded a material culture more closely dedicated to smaller spaces, and to the more intimate gatherings of family and friends. Let us turn, then, to the possessions of these middling groups.

Possessions Ownership of new goods was led by the middling classes. Extensive studies of probate inventories, the listings of goods taken after death, have revealed that each generation from the mid-seventeenth century to the mideighteenth century left behind more and better possessions, though the value of the goods as a proportion of estates did not rise. Approximately 25 to 30 per cent of wealth was held as consumer goods over the period. These inventories also show a preponderance of middling-class consumers of the widest array of new goods. The evidence of inventories discloses so much about the material culture of otherwise anonymous individuals. Analysis based on these inventories indicates much greater ownership of eating and drinking utensils, furnishings, books and pictures, looking glasses and clocks, and window curtains. Weatherill’s data indicates that ownership of earthenware and looking glasses roughly doubled over 1670–1725, while that of pewter plates, clocks, pictures, and window curtains increased from three to five times. The percentages of inventories containing knives and forks, china, and utensils for hot drinks rose from virtually none to 10 or 15 per cent.⁵⁰ New and decorative goods like pictures and window curtains were much more common in towns, and London dominated the indicators for possession of utensils for hot drinks. Possession of new goods also differed by social status, though often in unexpected ways. Weatherill found that new and expressive goods were more frequently found in the inventories of the middling classes, and especially the urban middling classes. There was a smooth gradation in the ownership of clocks from 4 per cent of husbandmen to 50 per cent of gentry in the later seventeenth century, and ⁴⁹ Memoir of James Bisset, 84. ⁵⁰ Lorna Weatherill, ‘The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods, 206–27, p. 220, table 10.

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A Nation of Shoppers Table 6.1. Ownership of goods, 1675–1725 Social status

Total inventory value (£)

Household goods (£)

Clocks (%)

Pictures (%)

Looking glasses (%)

China (%)

Knives and forks (%)

Gentry High trades Intermediate trades Low trades Widows/ spinsters

320 193 157

55 39 32

51 34 25

33 35 29

62 62 56

13 18 19

11 7 11

92 82

19 18

18 13

15 12

37 36

7 6

3 4

Source: Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, table 8.1, p. 168.

by 1725 to 8 per cent of husbandmen and 67 per cent of gentry. But for nearly all other new consumer items covered by Weatherill, tradesmen by 1725 dominated possession. The dealing trades—those ranging from small shopkeepers to merchants were the most urban group—had the highest proportion of inventories recording the new goods. Merchants, shopkeepers, and innkeepers were more likely to own the newer and more decorative consumer goods as well as books and clocks than were tailors, butchers, and blacksmiths. Chinaware was recorded in over half the inventories of the tradespeople in London, and looking glasses were more widely owned than chinaware. Indeed looking glasses were three times as common in dealers’ inventories as in those of yeomen. Weatherill emphasizes just how geographically widespread and socially deep these possessions ran.This was not a mass market, but it reached a broadly diverse middling order. And it was tradespeople who made up the bulk of those who owned the newer consumer goods.⁵¹ Not just metropolitan tradespeople, but urban provincial tradespeople wanted and bought the new goods. Over 30 per cent of the middling-class inhabitants of Bristol whose inventories were sampled left chinaware; but just over 16 per cent in the surrounding villages had these new luxuries. There were also, however, marked regional differences. The much larger data set of 8,000 inventories collected in the study by Overton and Whittle for the two counties of Kent and Cornwall indicates significant additions to the domestic environment in Kent along with higher levels of consumption. Many new types of furnishings and novelties appeared in the Kent inven⁵¹ Lorna Weatherill, ‘Consumer Behaviour and Social Status in England, 1660–1750’, Continuity and Change, 1 (1986), 191–216, p. 207.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes Table 6.2. Ownership of chinaware in Bristol and nearby villages 1660–1719

Items Owners Owners as a % of all luxury owners

1720–1780

Totals

Urban

Rural

Urban

Rural

Urban

Rural

75 27 4.9

9 5 2.9

519 73 31.5

13 10 16.4

594 100 12.7

22 15 6.4

Note: Includes punchbowls, tankards, coffee pots, teapots, chocolate pots, and china items found in 1,419 homes inventoried in Bristol and nearby villages. Source: Estabrook, Urbane and Rural England, table 6.13, drawn from Probate Inventories and Cause Papers, Bristol Record Office.

tories, while the quality of life in Cornwall declined over the period; its consumption was selective, practical, and traditional.⁵² These differences in possessions were very marked in the case of earthenware, glassware, and cutlery. The Kentish middling classes bought much greater varieties of pottery to suit different markets and uses. Inventories contained a median of 13 pieces of tableware in the first three decades of the seventeenth century, but they had 28 pieces in 1720–49. Where there was an average of two plates per household in Kent before the 1680s, there were 21 by the 1740s. More than enough for a dinner set, there was no doubt an extra set of best ware plates as well as spare plates. There were drinking glasses in less than 2 per cent of Kent inventories before the 1720s; by the 1740s over 20 per cent of households owned drinking glasses. Over 13 per cent of Kentish households sampled in 1720–49 used knives and forks; by the 1740s it was 25 per cent. The variety of eating and drinking utensils used in Kent rose from five different types to eight over the 1720s. Even Cornish households, selective and slow in their uptake of the new tableware (fewer than 3 per cent of households in the 1740s had forks), had a median of 14 plates, enough for two sets and spares in a household of less than six people. But there was little variety in the types of tableware, and no indication at all that these people drank tea, coffee, or chocolate until the 1720s, and even then only 12 per cent of these households had tea equipment in the 1740s.⁵³ ⁵² Mark Overton, ‘Geographies of Consumption in Early Modern England’, paper presented to the conference on Georgian Geographies, Paul Mellon Centre, London (Sept. 2000). ⁵³ Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Darron Dean, and Andrew Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (London, 2004), 107–8.

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A Nation of Shoppers Table 6.3. Percentages of households with new goods: Kent and Cornwall, 1660–1749

Variety of furniture types Kent (median no. of types) Kent Variety of furniture types: Cornwall New pottery: Kent New pottery: Cornwall Plates: Kent (median number) Plates: Cornwall (median number) Knives and forks: Kent Knives and forks: Cornwall Clocks: Kent Clocks: Cornwall Pictures: Kent Pictures: Cornwall Mirrors: Kent Mirrors: Cornwall

1660–89

1690–1719

1720–49

11

12

12

4 11 2 3 7 1 0 18 1 5 0 18 4

3 22 1 13 9 5 0 41 2 6 1 36 4

3 49 6 19 12 13 3 54 9 25 4 52 8

Source: From Overton et al., Production and Consumption, 91, 99, 111.

Studies based on probate inventories, notably those by Weatherill, Shammas, and Overton, cover the period between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries primarily because of the limitations of the source.⁵⁴ Probate inventories are lists of movable possessions that were recorded at death. Such inventories are more widespread and richer in detail for this period than later in the eighteenth century. They provide considerable detail on the possessions and consumer durables of the middling classes; there are relatively few that survive for the poor. Their coverage for women is also limited; they were made only for spinsters and widows. Probate inventories as a source have many other limitations. They provide information only on the accumulation of goods at the point of death, not on the flow of goods, or the timing of their accumulation. They do not distinguish between goods that were inherited and those that were bought. Only consumer durables were recorded, and these rarely included clothing. Only the quantities of the goods and their valuation at death were recorded, and the inventories tell us nothing of their meaning. The valuations assigned to ⁵⁴ Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour & Material Culture in Britain 1660–1760 (London, 1988), 22–42; Carole Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (Oxford, 1990).

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes these goods were frequently artificially low, reflecting the conventions of the valuers. The values listed, therefore, were not prices paid for the goods, nor even a cost assessment of their replacement values. Valuations taken at the end of a lifetime failed to capture the novelty or fashion value of a commodity.⁵⁵ It was equally the case, however, that many of the newer consumer expenditures were on perishables, and on ephemeral semi-durables, including paper, textiles, chapbooks, and pottery. The costs of many of these goods may have declined, or have been low enough to bring them into the horizons of labouring class expenditure for the first time.⁵⁶ Whatever these limitations, however, probate inventories also conveyed something of the mentality of the homes they described. They were usually made by someone very familiar with the deceased, often a neighbour or friend, and someone of the same status or occupation.The detailed descriptions of a number of the items indicated either a specialist knowledge of tools, or a close personal familiarity with household goods.⁵⁷ The probate inventories that provide so much of what we know of the possessions of broad parts of the population only ranged in many areas up to the second quarter of the eighteenth century, and there is no convincing explanation for why, in most areas, they ceased at that time. For any idea of what happened after we must rely for quantitative evidence on the much more aggregative categories listed in insurance records and on more impressionistic evidence gathered in the texts of wills, diaries, and accounts. Insurance records provide valuations for broad categories of possessions, and they do cover the later eighteenth century. It is not just the periodization covered by inventories that limits how far we can use them, but also just what they include. They often excluded valuable objects such as jewellery, silver, or glass, and many objects were obviously disposed of before an inventory was taken. Further, many legacies and gifts are to be found in the texts of wills, but not in the inventories. Possessions, in the later eighteenth century, were valuable proportions of estates; many, even those from the very modest middling groups, insured not just their property, but their goods. Neither insurance policies nor inventories, however, provide any indication of the way goods were displayed, stored, or indeed used, and never their relationship to the user, that is as a gift, a purchase on marriage, or an heirloom. ⁵⁵ See M. Spufford, ‘The Limitations of the Probate Inventory’, in J. Chartres and D. Hey (eds.), English Rural Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1990), 139–74; N. Cox and J. Cox, ‘Probate Inventories: The Legal Background’, Local Historian, 16 (1984), 133–45, 217–27. ⁵⁶ Carole Shammas, ‘Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550–1800’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods, 177–205, p. 191. ⁵⁷ Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England, 103–31.

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A Nation of Shoppers First we must have a sense of the spaces for which many of the new consumer goods were bought, that is, the housing for the middling classes. Most houses of the middle rank in the period between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century had between three and six rooms including a general living room or house place. This contained decorative objects such as pictures, looking glasses or a clock, and books. By the early eighteenth century many in this rank had a parlour or best living room with new types of furniture. Cooking and serving meals were significant in these households, but cooking utensils were kept simple and functional. The rural middling classes by the later eighteenth century had an average income of £100; those at its upper end had incomes of £150–700. Many were improving their houses by the mid-eighteenth century, replacing wood and stone with brick houses of six to eight rooms, including a living room, parlour, dairy and brewery, and a garret of servants’ rooms. The urban middling classes lived as their finances allowed, from those who paid 10s. a week for rooms above the shop in the provinces to those who might afford a house of £700 in London.They furnished their rooms as they could, some modestly, but others extending to wainscotting, plaster ceiling, carpets, wallpaper, and mahogany furniture.⁵⁸ Middling and smaller size houses in London were flexibly arranged to allow multiple room uses. Large numbers of houses incorporated shops, and most rooms in smaller houses contained a bed. The relatively substantial middling classes of the early eighteenth century averaged seven rooms to a household, but most had much less space.⁵⁹ Only the wealthiest quarter of the population could afford to rent larger houses, that is those with five rooms or more; rents for these were a minimum of £20 to £30 a year.⁶⁰ Many parts of the country experienced the building booms of the later 1770s and 1780s. London had the biggest surge in building of the century in the five years after 1774. This housing had more amenities. Fireplaces and bigger windows became standard, but spaces were also more confined. In small houses status was indicated by a simple cornice over the best fireplaces or in the best room, and plain painted panelling was found in all but the poorest houses.⁶¹ Housing estates went up in Liverpool, Bristol, Newcastle, Manchester, Birmingham, and Nottingham; 40–50 per cent of the houses built between 1750 and 1800 were built in towns. This not only put purchasing power in the hands of building craftsmen and their labourers, it also, as ⁵⁸ Burnett, A History of the Cost of Living, 167–9. ⁵⁹ Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London, 66–7. ⁶¹ Ibid. 72–3.

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⁶⁰ Ibid. 35.

Men and Women of the Middling Classes we have seen in the case of Birmingham, provided a new range of housing for artisan elites and the middling classes. One Birmingham building society proposed six streets with houses valued between £70 and £200. Some of the streets contained fashionable, terraced houses with sash windows and classical or Gothic front doors, and the subscription rates were for those earning a comfortable margin above subsistence.⁶² Such housing was predominantly insured in the middling range of £100 to £500; 48 per cent of insured metalworkers in Birmingham and 49 per cent in Sheffield valued their property thus. James Bisset’s first house, as we have seen, consisted of a parlour, kitchen, cellar and brewhouse, two chambers, and an attic.⁶³ This housing was not very different from the eighty-four Bristol homes which Carl Estabrook reconstituted room by room. He found fifty-eight of these houses with pictures, paintings, or prints on display. Among the more prosperous artisans and professionals the rooms were also increasingly differentiated, bedrooms set apart from centres of hospitality. Even poorer bakers, masons, grocers, clerks, tailors, and leather workers in Bristol entertained guests in separate front rooms or parlours.⁶⁴ Joseph Marks, who died in Bristol in 1746, left an estate valued at only £48 17s. 7d. Yet he occupied eight rooms and had access to a cellar. He arranged his accommodation vertically on three levels, with four rooms on the ground level, two in the storey above, and two in the storey above that. His house was only one room in width, but extended two or more rooms back from the street.The four upper rooms had beds. He brewed coffee in his kitchen, but welcomed guests in his front parlour.⁶⁵ The middle rank in Glasgow and Edinburgh lived in multi-storeyed tenements rather than the conventional two- or three-storey terraced houses of Birmingham and Bristol. A typical high-class shopkeeper like James Fulton, a Glasgow haberdasher, lived above his shop at the corner of Trongate and Hutcheson Street. The shop had four ‘elegant’ windows and two doors in front. There was a counting room behind the main shop. The flat on the first floor had a kitchen, dining room, and two bedrooms. There were two further storeys, each with a substantial flat with a kitchen, dining room, drawing room, and three bedrooms. Lesser shopkeepers had a front shop room, kitchen room, and cellar behind on the ground floor.⁶⁶ The goods the middling ranks kept in these properties were insured at a ⁶² S. D. Chapman and J. N. Bartlett, ‘The Contribution of Building Clubs and Freehold Land Societies to Working-Class Housing in Birmingham’, in S. D. Chapman (ed.), The History of WorkingClass Housing (Newton Abbot, 1971), 221–47, pp. 237–8; Chalklin, Provincial Towns, 264–70, 310–11. ⁶³ Memoir of James Bisset, 77. ⁶⁴ Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England, 152. ⁶⁵ Ibid. 128–9, 152. ⁶⁶ Nenadic, ‘The Middle Ranks’, 288.

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A Nation of Shoppers similar middle range as were the houses themselves; 37 per cent of insured metalworkers in Birmingham and 28 per cent in Sheffield insured their goods for £100 to £500.⁶⁷ People not infrequently valued their possessions at rates even higher than their houses. Though their commodities were certainly fewer than what we now have in our homes, relative values were much higher. The goods meant more to their eighteenth-century owners than do many of our things. And this includes not only things insured or counted by tax assessors, probate assessors, and bailiffs. For the middling classes, it is particularly important to consider those items which were rarely to be found in inventories, but which expressed imperatives of self-presentation and individuality. Sensitivity to image, and a propensity to buy display goods such as window curtains, mirrors, and best clothing played an important subjective role in consumer expenditure. The clothing that was rarely itemized in inventories was discussed in detail in the texts of wills.⁶⁸ Small items of silverware were vividly described and bequeathed with care among near and distant kin; mourning rings were allocated, and family watches identified and passed down. All of these possessions had functional and symbolic identities connected with social status, period and place, taste and manners. Consumers were also men and women, young and old, and the goods they bought and bequeathed also connected with gender identities. The course of the family life cycle also determined when ornamental and decorative goods were bought. The purchase of accessories and small items of luxury clothing by the lowermiddling class Latham family increased sharply in the 1740s and early 1750s as their six daughters became teenagers and young women.⁶⁹ While clothing, books, and watches preoccupied young Hutton and Bisset while they were still living in lodgings, on marriage and setting up a household they bought their furnishings. Purchases among the lower middling groups also marked the economic instability of their lives. They bought good furnishings and new ornamental goods as their fortunes rose, but might well expect to pawn these objects as regional or national economic crises hit their trades or professions. Francis Place, the tailor, described his recovery from one such setback: ‘We soon recovered from our deplorable condition, bought cloaths, and bedding and other necessaries, a good bedstead and many other ⁶⁷ Berg, ‘Small Producer Capitalism’, 30. ⁶⁸ Lorna Weatherill, ‘Consumer Behaviour, Textiles and Dress in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, Textile History, 22 (1991), 297–311; Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Social History, 30 (1996), 415–34. ⁶⁹ See the detailed discussion of the Latham family’s spending on clothing in John Styles, ‘Plebeian Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Berg and Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, 103–18.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes things that made us comfortable.’⁷⁰ Other new ornamental goods continued to be bought into old age as markers of family events, or as gifts to friends and young relatives. None of these goods were random purchases; they were chosen because of their particular use, display, sentimental attachment, or fashion appeal. Many of them were connected to settings of private and public sociability. Let us turn first to customs of eating and drinking, the furnishing of public display within private spaces, information goods, and polite behaviour. The timing of meals, sociable activity, and religious observance changed over the period, and varied between places. While much functional analysis has been accorded to timekeeping and the possession of clocks and watches, time was kept for a whole range of purposes apart from the world of work, and equally watches and clocks were kept for an even greater range of reasons. After the 1740s over a third of the better off in Bristol had a clock and a quarter had watches. Clocks were just as important to rural inhabitants. Farmers in surrounding villages who might own few other comforts or conveniences did have a clock and clock case which might range in value from £1 to £3.⁷¹ Even more of those in Kent owned clocks—over 78 per cent by the 1740s, while only 12 per cent of Cornishmen did.⁷² The watches were not necessarily for keeping the time, and time was also about sociability.⁷³ Meal times then as now varied between countries and social classes, but they also changed over the course of the century.The meal times of the elites and the better-off middling classes moved forward. Where dinner before the Restoration was between noon and 1 p.m., in the early eighteenth century it went forward to 2 or 3 p.m., and by the later eighteenth century was at 4 or 5 p.m. A country correspondent in the 1790s complained that in town ‘the manners, the customs, the hours of eating, and in short, the whole face of things is . . . turned topsy-turvy within these 40 years’.⁷⁴ In the 1780s Catherine Hutton, William Hutton’s daughter, was clearly shocked at the vast feast she sat down to as the guest of the rector at Aston, Derbyshire: ‘At three o’clock we sat down to table, which was covered with salmon at top ⁷⁰ Francis Place, The Autobiography of Francis Place, ed. Mary Thrale (Cambridge, 1972), 111, 127. Cited in Rebecca Davies, ‘Rags or Ruffles? The World of Goods of the Respectable Artisan, c.1780–1830’ (MA dissertation, University of Warwick, 2002), 19. ⁷¹ Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England, 138, 147. ⁷² Overton et al., Production and Consumption, 111. ⁷³ Cf. Joahim Voth, ‘Time and Work in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Economic History, 58 (1998), 28–58; Nigel Thrift and Paul Glennie,‘The Spaces of Clock Times’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London, 2002), 151–74. Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England 1680–1780 (Berkeley, 1986), 53–6. ⁷⁴ Cited in Clark, British Clubs, 181.

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A Nation of Shoppers . . . at the bottom a lin of veal roasted . . . in the middle a hot pigeon pie . . . [then] succeeded ham and chickens, and when everything was removed came a currant tart.’ Though the Hutton family was well off by this stage, she clearly regarded the display as unseemly: the rector’s ‘face proclaims him a drunkard, and his manners at table an epicure’.⁷⁵ These were not the habits followed among tradespeople, artisans, and more ordinary middling groups, where 1 p.m. was the more conventional eating time.⁷⁶ Among the wealthier middling groups and the elites dinner was an elaborate meal, and was frequently associated with guests or the extended family. Dining rooms contained valuable furnishings: a mahogany table, best chairs, silver candlesticks, dinner services, and linen table cloths.⁷⁷ In Glasgow and Edinburgh the upper ranks of the middling classes by the middle of the century set aside a separate dining room as the centre of largely male sociability, and displayed in it their most costly possessions. Whereas in the early eighteenth century, by far the greatest value was invested in the bedstead, mattress, bedding, and bed curtains, in the 1760s more status was attached to a large dining table with a matching set of chairs.This room also contained large numbers of drinking glasses, wine and spirit decanters, and ornate punch bowls. Mixed-gender dining was, however, not widely fashionable in the Scottish upper middling-class household until the 1810s and 1820s.⁷⁸ At more modest income levels dining was still central, and was less rigidly gender divided. Cooking and serving meals occupied a special place in middling and labouring class households. Social conventions on the timing of meals, the laying out of the table, and the presentation of food would become the subject of conduct manuals and etiquette for the upper middle classes, but for most these practices were subconscious. The food preparation was done or directed by the wife or mother in the household, and in ordinary middling-class families was rarely delegated to servants. This was also the case with serving meals, and priority was given to acquiring a table for eating around as well as the appropriate serving utensils, cutlery, and best and ordinary earthenware dishes and glasses. By the later seventeenth century more and smaller dishes and courses were served at a meal. Even among ⁷⁵ Cited in Bridget Hill, ‘Catherine Hutton (1756–1846): A Forgotten Letter-Writer’, Women’s Writing, 1 (1994), 35–50, p. 41. ⁷⁶ Memoir of James Bisset, 87. ⁷⁷ Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 206. ⁷⁸ Overton et al., Production and Consumption, 105. On the evolution of table manners, though mainly among the elites, see Jean-Louis Flandrin, ‘Distinction through Taste’, in Roger Chartier (ed.), A History of Private Life, iii Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 265–308.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes

Fig. 6.4. Arrival of the country relations, 1812. Alexander Carse. In a private Scottish collection.

small yeomen three ‘dishes’ were commonly served from an array of bowls and plates. This replaced the common meal served from a trencher or large platters.⁷⁹ Relatives, friends, and callers might be invited to stay for meals, so that the dining area of a middling-class house was one of those ‘front stage’ areas within the private space of the household where outsiders entered from time to time. It, like the parlour, was furnished and decorated with best things.⁸⁰ Breakfast and tea drinking were completely new customs; both coincided with the introduction of hot drinks—tea, chocolate, and coffee, and the ceramic, steel, or silver-plated and glass vessels to go with this. By 1760 a breakfast of toast and rolls and tea was entrenched in middling circles. Among the elites it was mainly a male meal, taken before sport or a business expedition.⁸¹ ⁷⁹ Nenadic, ‘Middle Rank Consumers’, 143; ‘The Middle Ranks’, 291. ⁸⁰ Weatherill, ‘The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour’, 220. ⁸¹ William Woodruff Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability (London, 2003), 185; Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 273; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 206.

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A Nation of Shoppers Tea drinking was a domestic event, still limited until the last half of the eighteenth century mainly to the middling and upper classes, but quickly becoming a priority of expenditure among the artisan and labouring classes and even the poor. Tea and coffee were particularly associated with polite behaviour. Dr Thomas Short, writing about tea in the mid-eighteenth century, argued that coffee and tea had public value. Drinking these new beverages was associated with desirable behaviour—doing business, holding conversations, and acting and speaking intelligently. The public code of the coffee house was complemented in Britain by private codes of tea drinking, which soon prevailed over coffee house culture.Tea drinking played the part of a ritual of visiting, with a recognizable ceremony, and portable utensils which might be relatively simple or expensive and elaborate. Unlike other rituals of sociability and drinking, it took place not in the alehouse or coffee house, but in the private spaces of the home: it was conducted by and included women of the household.⁸² By the mid-eighteenth century in many middling-class houses the parlour was changing to a private/public comfortable space instead of a public reception room. Used by the family, it was also the place where selected guests were entertained, and contained pictures and prints, small tea tables and best chinaware. Elizabeth Wells of Bridge had ‘five china cups and saucers’ in her parlour in 1743.⁸³ Tea drinking was like other rituals in providing a convention to set up visible public definitions. The meaning of the ritual was fixed by making it public, visible, and recognizable. Those meanings could be most effectively fixed through material things, and the more costly relative to other household goods, the more effective. Everyday ware was thus distinguished from best ware brought out on Sundays or when guests appeared.Tea drinking provided an opportunity for sociability involving all members of a household and for displaying a range of luxury goods from the tea itself to decorated porcelain or fine earthenware and, where possible, silver plate or silver. Tea drinking had become a regular ritual; it was infrequent with guests, but had become an expected time of sociability. Tea drinking and the equipage and chinaware that went with acted in two capacities open to an anthropological approach. It both increased personal availability, and it acted as a marker of ranks.⁸⁴ Satire mocked the refined theatricals of the rich around tea tables and re⁸² Weatherill, ‘The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour’, 214–15. ⁸³ Overton et al., Production and Consumption, 136. ⁸⁴ Mary Douglas, ‘Why do People Want Goods?’, in S. H. Heap and A. Ross (eds.), Understanding the Enterprise Culture: Themes in the Work of Mary Douglas (Edinburgh, 1992), 19–31, pp. 24–6.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes fined china, and juxtaposed these with the place of tea and china ware in the inversion narratives of prostitutes and the labouring poor. Pamphleteers and hack writers identified the tea table as a public/private space for discussion of the latest pornography. Thomas Stretser wrote of the reception of his pamphlet, A New Description of Merryland (1741): ‘I am sorry to find that some of the fair-sex, as well as the men, have too freely testified their approbation of this pretty pamphlet, as they call it, and that over a tea-table some of them make no more scruple of mentioning Merryland, than any other part of the creation.’⁸⁵ Hogarth centred three of the six scenes of his satirical print series, ‘A Harlot’s Progress’, on tea table scenes. The second scene depicted a kept mistress in an expensively appointed apartment, overturning a rococo mahogany tea table, its oriental chinaware falling broken on the ground. The third print depicted the mistress descended to prostitute in Drury Lane, her ragged maid pouring tea, with a small delicate cup and saucer, sugar pot and teapot, and silver slop bowl laid out on a small round wooden bedside table.The fifth in the series depicted the death of the prostitute, the picture centred again on another fallen table, this one a small rough-hewn and common square table, its porcelain sugar pot broken on the floor.⁸⁶ Moralists denounced the luxury spending habits of the poor, encapsulating consumer vice in tea paraphernalia. Jonas Hanway, the much-cited early eighteenth-century moral reformer, in 1721 blamed tea drinking for the misplaced priorities of the labouring poor on their tea equipage.⁸⁷ Scots, alarmed at the inroads of tea drinking during the succeeding twenty years in their east-coast seaside and fishing communities, declared tea ‘had become “the common Breakfast of Bluegowns and the Fish-carriers of Musselburgh”, while footmen and porters got drunk on punch as freely and almost as cheaply as they had formerly done on ale’.⁸⁸ Whatever the alarm expressed that tea drinking extended into the ranks of the workforce and the poor, or the satirical inversions of polite society provided by prostitute narratives, the middling classes adopted the ritual ⁸⁵ Cited in Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities 1700–1800 (Basingstoke, 1997), 13. ⁸⁶ For discussion of the wider themes of ‘The Harlot’s Progress’, see Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference, 93–100. ⁸⁷ Jonas Hanway, ‘An Essay on Tea’, in A Journal of Eight Days Journey, 2 vols. (London, 1757), ii. 55, 64. Jonathan White, ‘Luxury and Labour: Ideas of Labouring-Class Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England’, University of Warwick Ph.D. thesis (2003), 278–82. ⁸⁸ D. Forbes, Some Considerations on the Present State of Scotland in a Letter to the Commissioners and Trustees for Improving the Fisheries and Manufactures (London, 1744), cited in Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society 1707–1830 (Manchester, 2000), 75.

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A Nation of Shoppers sociability and the material equipment of the tea table into their canons of respectability. A set of good chinaware was just as important to those who were just getting by as to the better off. Those in Bristol, between 1720 and 1780, who owned china had on average more than fourteen pieces per household. A very modest householder such as Joseph Marks with his £48 worth of assets had a dozen china cups and saucers, eight chocolate cups, and a teapot, as well as five silver spoons. Even Samuel Parrett, the poor tinplate maker worth only £11 10s. much earlier in the century, in 1713 had eleven pieces of a china coffee service.⁸⁹ Women generally presided over the making and serving of tea and dictated courtesy and an informal familial sociability which was also inclusive of visitors and callers. Catherine Hutton wrote, ‘Dr. Priestley admired my father [William Hutton], and frequently took tea with us, without ceremony.’ The pious Julius Hardy, a medium-scale button manufacturer, also attested to the relative informality and openness of tea drinking. While still a bachelor, he recorded several visits to his home and to the homes of others for tea, some by invitation, others by chance. This included visits by women, sometimes alone, including those by Miss Nancy Gardiner, where tea became the occasion for a marriage proposal.⁹⁰ Middling-class households made the tea equipage and porcelain teaware their central luxury expenditures; among the better off, it allowed a display of female manners and fashionable possessions. Among artisans and tradespeople, tea drinking was equally important; the best possible wares were sought out, for this was the most inclusive form of sociability. Tea was taken at shops as well as at home.⁹¹ The middling classes turned social practices conveying elite deportment and gentility to their own social assumptions. These classes, based in the expansion of commerce, associated commerce with refining the passions and ‘civilizing’ the people. In Scotland, enlightened writers connected economic improvement to wider access to material goods and sociability.⁹² According to commercial apologists, the manners of innkeepers and shopkeepers were polished as they sold their merchandise to ⁸⁹ Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England, 128, 139. ⁹⁰ Hutton, A Narrative of the Riots, 5. Diary of Julius Hardy 1788–1793, Button-Maker, of Birmingham. Transcribed and annotated by A. M. Banks, April 1973. City Archives, Birmingham Central Library, MS 218. See the visits on 7, 11, 23 August, 30 October, 30 November, 4 December 1790, pp. 44–54. ⁹¹ Smith, Consumption, 151, 173–4; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 207–8. ⁹² Nicholas Philipson, ‘Politics, Politeness and the Anglicisation of Early Eighteenth-Century Scottish Culture’, in R. A. Mason (ed.), Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh, 1987), 17–34, and his Hume (London, 1989), 17–34.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes others. Paradoxically, codes of behaviour for the interpersonal relations of the market place developed out of the patrician manners of the landed elites. Politeness developed out of an image of ‘accessible gentility’. Politeness, as an ease in relating to those from all social classes, provided access to status and social acceptability.⁹³ This ‘politeness’ was not just about interpersonal manners; historians have applied it to material culture, domestic and public space, intellectual life, and institutional structures.⁹⁴ It was especially an ethos for the urban middling classes. In public, it underpinned the behaviour in coffee houses and clubs. Informal codes of appropriate behaviour governed access to coffee houses and clubs where eating, drinking, and discussion took place in rooms laid out and furnished by the landlords. But above all politeness dictated commercial urban lifestyle. Merchants and tradesmen sold to each other through distinctive conversational style, expectations of hospitality, and the appropriate position, type, and decoration of their houses.⁹⁵ Professionals sold their services on images of probity, virtue, and comfortable but ‘informed’ consumption. Pictures, books, clocks, and other mathematical instruments rated highly among possessions. Shopkeepers sold to customers who expected interiors and displays to accord with the goods to be bought; customers expected conversation along with advice and not merely a sales pitch. Right at the beginning of the eighteenth century Mandeville described how sugar merchants made their deals; in the example he constructed their commerce was deeply embedded in a consumer culture involving a country house, a coach, dinner with an appropriately elaborate place setting, horse riding, conversation, and humour.⁹⁶ The middling classes aspired to a politeness that was based in discussion and social interaction with a wide range of people. Conversation was cosmopolitan, but also drew on the ‘refinement of the arts’, those leisured pursuits from pleasure gardens and theatre to reading and music. William Hutton maintained that Birmingham was polite if not genteel. ‘Gentlemen as well as buttons have been stamped here, but like them, when finished are moved off.’ He argued that ‘The prosperity of a town depends upon its ⁹³ Langford, ‘The Uses of Eighteenth-Century Politeness’. ⁹⁴ For a survey of the way historians have applied ‘politeness’ to many aspects of eighteenth-century material life, politics, and culture see Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’. On politeness and masculinity see Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society 1660–1800 (London, 2001), 53–75. See Helen Berry’s critique of ‘politeness’ as an analytic category in ‘Rethinking Politeness in Eighteenth-Century England: Moll King’s Coffee House and the Significance of “Flash Talk” ’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 11 (2001), 65–81. ⁹⁵ See Hancock, Citizens of the World, 17–34. ⁹⁶ Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, Remark B, p. 96.

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A Nation of Shoppers commerce; as that increases knowledge, freedom, taste, luxury, power and civilization increase.’⁹⁷ Provincial middling-class consumers conveyed their politeness as superior to aristocratic luxury and metropolitan fashion. They sought out newly designed products reflecting simplicity, taste, and ‘improvement’: Wedgwood vases, Soho tea urns, Sheffield cutlery, clocks, automata and measuring devices, prints and engravings. New and inventive commodities conveyed some knowledge of science and technology.⁹⁸ The luxury goods these polite middling-class purchasers sought were not about excess; they symbolized knowledge, conveniency, and personal choice. Men and women made the decisions on purchases and possessions; gender dictated choice as much as class.

Gender and Consumers There may have been a distinctive middling-class leadership among consumers of new commodities in the eighteenth century. But we have almost always assumed these consumers to have been women. The gendered stereotypes of the female consumer have dominated representations of the ‘consumer revolution’. These stereotypes go back to associations between consumption and sexuality, and they have related to elite women and servants. John Gay in his poem of 1725, ‘To a Lady on her Passion for old China’, provided a whimsical account of the connection: What ecstasies her bosom fire! How her eyes languish with desire! How blest, how happy should I be, Were that fond glance bestow’d on me! New doubts and fears within me war: What rival’s near? A China Jar. China’s the passion of her soul; A cup, a plate, a dish, a bowl Can kindle wishes in her breast, Inflame with joy, or break her rest. . . . Husbands more covetous than sage Condemn this China-buying rage; They count that woman’s prudence little; ⁹⁷ Sweet, ‘Topographies of Politeness’, 368–9. ⁹⁸ For discussion of ‘polite’ consumer goods see Klein,‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, 884–92.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes Who sets her heart on things so brittle. But are those wise-men’s inclinations Fixt on more strong, more sure foundations?⁹⁹

Sombart in Luxury and Capitalism explained the rise of luxury, ultimately, by the psychological impulse to gratify the senses; senses rooted, in turn, in sexuality. Mistresses, courtesans, and salon culture provided the sirens of consumer society.¹⁰⁰ Simmel also identified a gendered dynamic behind fashion, a dynamic also embedded in psychological impulses, but in this case impulses of imitation and emulation. He identified a fundamental conflict in society between adaptation to our social group and individual elevation from it. It was class based, so that imitation from below of a given pattern was followed by flight towards novelty and distinction from above.¹⁰¹ Women pursued fashion for status and distinction. Women’s desires for consumer goods have been assumed to be generic, driven by leisured conspicuous consumption, female vanity, and fashion. Neil McKendrick makes a claim for female agency, and especially that of servants in spreading the desires for consumer goods derived from gendered presentations of the luxury debates, especially as conveyed in these influential texts by Sombart and Simmel, as well as Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Not only servants and courtesans but female industrial workers were assumed to be subject to such desires. Moralists condemned young spinners for spending the money they earned in domestic manufacture in ‘buying fine clothes and other gawdy gew gaws’.¹⁰² Historians, now deconstructing this identity, rarely, however, interrogate the political and moral discourse underpinning it.¹⁰³ Moreover, they have internalized contemporary ideologies as practical social behaviour. Recent theories of household behaviour such as de Vries’s ‘industrious revolution’ rely to a certain extent on such assumptions of eighteenthcentury practices. De Vries’s theory rests on intra-household decisions over labour, leisure, and consumption taken among husbands, wives, and children. De Vries, like McKendrick, drew attention to the rising decisionmaking role of the woman of the household (assumed to be a wife). He ⁹⁹ John Gay, ‘To a Lady on her Passion for old China’ (1725), in Gay, Trivia, and Other Poems (London, 1899). ¹⁰⁰ Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, 105. ¹⁰¹ Frisby and Featherstone, Simmel on Culture, 187–98. ¹⁰² Pollexfen in 1681, cited in Steensgaard, ‘Growth and Composition’, 127. ¹⁰³ Amanda Vickery,‘Women and the World of Goods: A Lancashire Consumer and her Possessions 1751–81’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), 274–304, esp. pp. 274–8.

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A Nation of Shoppers charts a shift away from relative self-sufficiency in consumer goods towards market-supplied goods, that is a shift from traditionally female-supplied home-produced goods to commercially produced items. He sets out a model or theoretical construct of the household to explain why and how consumption changed among labourers and artisans. The wife in the De Vries model takes on a primary role as decision-maker in consumption, and occupies a strategic place at the intersection of reproduction, production, and consumption. She is an ‘active consumer’ rather than a passive victim of fashion manipulators. She is willing to shift her tastes to buy novelties and luxuries in the market place for herself and the household, but she must also have power in household decision-making.¹⁰⁴ That power in decisionmaking is made in earning power, and this depends in turn upon work opportunities for women. The new consumer industries of the protoindustrial period and the early stages of the industrial revolution relied on a female labour force. This labour force, in turn, provided customers for products. De Vries’s model household thus neatly provides both the labour and the consumer markets for new industry. De Vries’s concept of an ‘industrious revolution’ makes a place for consumption in the wider economic transition of the period, and is a theory which also seeks to place gender and household behaviour at the centre of explanation. It focuses, however, on connections between consumption and labour, and is largely concerned with the behaviour of labouring women. Their increased labour in low-wage occupations did not necessarily entail greater power in family decision-making. While drawing attention to gender, this theory does not address the actual practices of women’s and men’s consumption. Neither does it explain the prior consumption of middlingclass women. Evidence here is lamentably thin; supposition drawn mainly from literary analogy builds an insubstantial edifice of gendered representations with emphasis on fictions, eroticism, and the male gaze.¹⁰⁵ Too often we think of women’s possession of movable consumer goods to be an indicator of their subordinate status within the family, their baubles a poor compensation for lack of landed property and housing. Evidence on gender differences in ¹⁰⁴ De Vries, ‘Between Purchasing Power’, 112–19. ¹⁰⁵ See e.g. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects (New York, 1997); the section on ‘What Women Want’ in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (eds.), The Consumption of Culture (London, 1995), 419–534; Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (eds.), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996); Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture 1665–1800 (Oxford, 1997); and the chapter on ‘Women and Eighteenth-Century Consumerism’ in G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), 154–214.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes possessions and buying practices must be gathered in painstaking research on household inventories, the study of the text of wills, household accounts, family correspondence, diaries, and autobiographies. Elizabeth Shackleton, a woman of the lesser Lancashire gentry, left a diary which provides insight into the day-to-day expenditure of elite women and the meanings they attached to the goods they bought. As Amanda Vickery has argued, much of this consumption was the skilled provisioning and servicing of a household, based on the gathering and sharing of information with other women on prices, quality, and availability. Shackleton’s purchase of fashionable clothing, furniture, and china displayed her social status and gave her personal pleasure, but it also expressed a wide range of other motivations and meanings from family history to individual memory and sociability.¹⁰⁶ For those women lower down the social scale over the broad range of the middling classes, we must turn to wills and probate inventories, and the wills in particular indicate similarities in consumer behaviour. Lorna Weatherill’s classic studies of the middling orders based on probate inventories from 1660 to 1760 identified few major differences in possessions between men and women; certainly higher proportions of women had new and decorative goods than did the men from similar classes, but these differences were too small to warrant the suggestion of a women’s subculture in the ownership of goods. She emphasized that women’s possessions indicated that they saw themselves as part of a family and household.¹⁰⁷ Even the limited evidence of meaning and motivation available from inventories can, as she argues, indicate that the women of the household played a role in cooking and in the arrangement and serving of meals. Inventories provide insight into the use of space as well as the quantities, variety, and placement of material possessions. A different material culture for the serving and eating of meals did emerge between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries; it included decorated pottery and porcelain, knives and forks, conduct and manners over serving, and rituals of tea drinking, all set in ‘front stage’ locations in the household.¹⁰⁸ Evidence of bequests made in wills rather than indices of possessions at death show sharp differences between men’s and women’s perceptions of what they owned. The women of Sheffield and Birmingham left ¹⁰⁶ Vickery, ‘Women and the World of Goods’, 280, 292. ¹⁰⁷ Lorna Weatherill, ‘A Possession of One’s Own: Women and Consumer Behaviour in England 1660–1740’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 131–56, p. 155. Also see a similar point made in Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer, 180–1. ¹⁰⁸ Weatherill, ‘The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour’, 206–27.

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A Nation of Shoppers Table 6.4. Types of goods left in wills: analysis by gender of testator, Birmingham and Sheffield, 1700–1800 Birmingham

Apparel Furniture Household goods Linen Jewellery Ornaments Plate Silver China

Sheffield

Men %a

Women %a

Men %a

Women %a

15.64 17.77 40.52 14.22 4.74 1.90 1.66 12.08 5.69

26.98 19.84 18.25 21.43 16.67 1.59 8.73 15.08 6.35

7.21 22.14 24.61 10.72 1.76 0.53 5.62 6.68 2.11

25.64 28.85 20.51 19.23 9.62 0.00 6.41 15.39 5.13

a Means the testators who left this type of goods in their wills, taken as a percentage of those testators who left goods at all. Notes: Analysis of testatory documents of metalworkers and women in Birmingham and Sheffield, 1700–1800. Sample: 422 male metalworkers form Birmingham; 569 male metalworkers form Sheffield; 126 women of all trades from Birmingham; 156 women of all trades from Sheffield. Source: Records in Diocesan Record Office, Lichfield, and the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York.

substantially more bequests containing clothing, jewellery, linen, and silver than did men. Women presented their goods, and wrote of their family and friends in ways quite different from men.Women provided very detailed descriptions of their things; clothes, light furnishings, marked and table linens, tea and china ware were personal and expressive goods, conveying identity, personality, and fashion.Their bequests presented a carefully coded inventory of their things embedded in statements about their networks of family and friends. The men left few details of their clothing and furnishings, and generally passed these on to direct family members. The women who left these wills added new commodities to old inherited possessions; they cannot be easily categorized as fashionable conspicuous consumers, or as simple bearers of household or family well-being. For their wills indicate a whole range of clothing, light furnishings, and ornaments clearly perceived as personal possessions, and as thus, richly described and sensitively distributed among friends and family.¹⁰⁹ Women and men were intensely conscious of clothing, and clothing ¹⁰⁹ See Berg, ‘Women’s Consumption’, 415–34.

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes accounted for high insurance valuations and detailed bequests even amongst those who left modest cash bequests and no property. Among better-off London tradesmen even early in the century, one apprentice had clothes valued between £10 and £20, and a tradesman’s wife accounted hers to be worth between £15 and £20. Altogether these middling tradesmen’s families spent about a quarter of their outgoings yearly on their clothes.The value of such clothing was enhanced in a context where finishings and accessories expressed gradations in apparel and fashion; clothing passed down might be easily altered and updated. These ornaments and accessories were prominent among new consumer goods; many were made in Birmingham: buttons, buckles, jewellery, cut steel ornament, medallions. One mideighteenth-century invoice listed eight types of shirt buttons and fourteen sorts of gilt, plated, tin, and horn buttons. It listed seven types of buckles along with thirty-two types of stockings. Despite the value of the clothes, the texts of the wills make it clear that most women who bequeathed their clothing did so because of the personal identity it conveyed. A woman’s bequests of clothing were about passing on something of her identity to favoured friends and relations closest to her.¹¹⁰ Middling-class women were also very attached to their decorative furnishings, many of which were newer and fashionable items which they had selected: small tables, painted and cane tables and chairs, and tea tables and chests. Let us look at some of the ways these women described their things, and their relationships to those to whom they gave them.¹¹¹ The Birmingham widows reflect the full range of middling-class incomes and possessions. Eleanor May, a widow who died during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, had goods in her inventory valued at £81, and these included pewter, candlesticks, and curtains. But her will left to her daughter a chamber table, four stuff chairs, and one little oval table. Elizabeth Lynes, the widow of a metalworker, did not bequeath her house in the will she made in 1739, but she left to her daughter the great ‘oval’ table and the little square table in the house along with the table in the summer house and six cane chairs. Sarah Loome, the widow of a smith, in mid-century left to a ‘loving kinswoman’ her square table and looking glass standing in her best chamber. And in the 1790s Elizabeth Farquharson, the widow of a refiner, left to her sister for her use during her life four painted chairs, a mahogany wash-stand, and a night table, along with a bedstead, mattress, ¹¹⁰ Berg, ‘Women’s Consumption’, 422–4; Earle, Making of the English Middle Class, 283, 288–90; Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 64, 87. ¹¹¹ The cases discussed in the following paragraphs are taken from Berg, ‘Women’s Consumption’, 420–7.

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A Nation of Shoppers

Fig. 6.5. Cornelia Knight, writer and poet, 1793. Angelica Kauffmann. Detail of cameo belt buckle. Manchester City Art Gallery.

and linen damask bed hangings. She further dictated that after her sister’s death these were to go to her friend. In Sheffield, Grace Genn left to her daughter a mahogany tea table and tea chest, and, towards the end of the century, Elizabeth Anderton left to her female companion half a dozen ‘leather-bottom’d’ chairs, an armchair, and a round oak tea table in the sitting room. Isabella Dawson, much wealthier, with a house and cash legacies of £320, made careful divisions among her things to pass down to younger relations. She left her niece a ‘large pier glass with walnut frame in my back room’ and sedan chair, and her nephew received her large pier glass with gilt frame in the parlour. Her husband’s nephew received a mahogany oval table standing in the parlour as well as a chair and pier glass, an oak oval table in the back room, her old clock and bureau, a settee and a double chest of drawers in the red room, and a blue silk damask chair. Her husband’s niece, on the other hand, received her tea things, including mahogany table, chest and tray, tea china, red and white enamelled china plates, blue and white china plates,

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Men and Women of the Middling Classes silver plated candlesticks, a swing-glass lacquered with gold, and a yellow silk fire screen. These women described and distributed their domestic possessions with meticulous care.Tea equipment, silver, and linen especially indicated differences in familial and emotional attachments to goods. Tea utensils, chests, trays, tables, and silver teaspoons and tongs as well as chinaware were owned by men and women, but it was still the case for the middling classes of Birmingham and Sheffield that more women than men bequeathed these items to friends and relations. Both the men and women who left tea things chose female relatives and friends or wives of friends to give them to. The wealthy Sheffield spinster Dorothy Ridgeway left her nephew two silver candlesticks, but her nieces and sister received all the silver table and tea ware as well as a best set of nantz china and another set of tea china. Grace Genn, as previously mentioned, left her daughter her tea table and chest and jewellery, but her son her black horse and clock. The teaware left by these widows and spinsters was vital to domestic sociability throughout the middling classes and the elites. Elizabeth Shackleton was ‘devoted to tea parties’, and business in shops and at home with shopkeepers, haberdashers, and seamstresses was all conducted along with tea drinking. Merchants visiting factories and warehouses also expected to take tea on their arrival. Consuming tea was not just about the rituals of making and serving; it was about the tea equipage—the silver and china vessels for tea making, the tea tables and tea caddies, and tea sets and cutlery that went with it. These possessions might vary in quantity, value, and style according to wealth, but by the mid-eighteenth century they were priorities in the consumer expenditure of men and women of the respectable artisan and middling classes as well as the elites. The middling classes kept silver and linen, collected it, and bequeathed it as a way of marking family connection. While it was frequently men who bought the family silver, and indeed chose a very conservative range of items, women in the provincial middling classes added a whole new dimension to this traditional pattern of consumption. They bought a range of new items in silver, many of them small novelties, coffee and tea pots and spoons, pepper caster and buckles, which they then bequeathed to a range of younger relations. Silver spoons, cups, sugar tongs, casters, salvers, and ladles were frequently apportioned among several children or nieces and nephews as a form of family keepsake. Elizabeth Lynes in 1739 left a daughter a silver snuff box. Isabella Dawson left her nephew a large array of small silver items, but her niece only a silver coffee pot and two silver sauce-boats.

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A Nation of Shoppers Mary Withers, the wife of a gentleman who had two houses of her own, left her silver shoe buckles and half a dozen silver teaspoons to her great-niece. Linens were even more carefully described; many were personally worked, and a number of Birmingham and Sheffield women passed these down as very personal bequests to their relatives. Silver and linen were two commodities which provincial middling-class women bought in a new array of objects and designs, yet also added to with their own personal stamp or sign of personal production by engraving or marking family names or initials, and embroidering or working special designs. These commodities though bought were transformed from the anonymity of the market place to signifiers of family and memory.There was a great expansion in the array of new commodities amenable to this individual or domestic ornamentation: medallions, emblems, stamped glassware, silver objects and plated ware, chinaware marked with crests or coats of arms which may have fulfilled a growing need to mark family and friendship connections or provided new ways of celebrating family occasions or cultural festivals. On one level these were fashionable ephemera, but they were turned into family keepsakes and friendship mementoes. Women’s bequests showed them using such commodities, especially small silver items and linens, to enhance their family and friendship relationships.The point about the silver items was that they were small and attractive, they had some value, but not too much, and they were enough to be a reminder to others of themselves. There was a definite protocol in bequests of certain goods followed by men and women: jewellery, some silver and pewter, religious books and basic household goods, furnishings and linen were distributed down male or female lines and among close or more distant kin. Women were indeed active consumers of new ornamental goods, but their motivations were complex. Clothes, light furnishings, tea things, china, and newer silver items brought luxury, fashion, individuality, and personal identity to the possessions of the middling classes; they were the modern purchases made throughout the provinces, not just by those of the metropolis or the fashionable spa towns. And they were particularly sought out, cherished, and dispensed by women. Our knowledge of the practices of women’s consumption from the mundane and daily to the magnificent and episodic is still patchy, with little on life-cycle, class, and rural–urban differentiation. The evidence we have does, however, challenge the gendered stereotype of the rapacious female consumer. A corresponding picture of male consumer behaviour is almost wholly non-existent, apart from the caricatures of the effeminate fop adorned in French luxury, on the one hand, and of the vulgar and corrupted ~ 242 ~

Men and Women of the Middling Classes Anglo-Indian nabob on the other.¹¹² Men have not featured in any significance in histories of fashionable consumption, perhaps because of those same stereotypes of separate spheres which so underpinned assumptions about the female consumer.¹¹³ Men did much more of the shopping for new consumer goods than we imagine.They were frequently delegated in trips to provincial towns and the metropolis, or even abroad to buy for the household. Some took the initiative, as in the case of Ben Franklin who sent a package of English cloths to his wife in 1758, describing them as: ‘56 yards of cotton, printed curiously from copper plates, a new invention, to make bed and window curtain. Also 7 yards of printed cottons blue ground, to make you a gown.’¹¹⁴ Male dress in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was as laden with fashion as was women’s, and male diarists reveal active and enthusiastic shopping activity, as well as the full range of motivations and sensibilities over their possessions that women did.¹¹⁵ Their clothing provided access to respectability, and was valued accordingly in their insurance policies.¹¹⁶ Research is still very limited on masculinity and consumption, hampered as it has been by a separate spheres discourse. While later nineteenth-century male clothing is now investigated, there has been minimal research on eighteenth-century experiences. Margot Finn has found male diarists of the eighteenth century to exhibit a similar consumer agency, and similar experiences of day-to-day purchases, acquisitive impulses, and gift giving as those women given a special consumer space by Amanda Vickery.¹¹⁷ Specific articles of masculine dress such as wigs, and specific attributes of masculine interiors such as dining rooms and their ornamentation with fireplaces, tables, and punch bowls form only the beginnings of research.¹¹⁸ Men of the elites made the decisions, and either made the purchases or took part in shopping for major items of expenditure on larger pieces of furniture as well as silverware. The larger pieces of mahogany furniture in Elizabeth Shackleton’s house were bought by her husband on a special trip ¹¹² See Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, 124–52, and E. M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies. ¹¹³ Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life 1860–1914 (Manchester, 1999), 4–8. ¹¹⁴ Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 109. ¹¹⁵ Margot Finn, ‘Men’s Things: Masculine Possession in the Consumer Revolution’, Social History, 25 (2000), 133–56. ¹¹⁶ See Berg, ‘Small Producer Capitalism’. ¹¹⁷ See the points made on separate spheres by Breward, The Hidden Consumer, 3–16; on male diarists see Finn, ‘Men’s Things’, 142–8, and Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), 85–8. ¹¹⁸ Negley Harte, ‘Why Did Men Wear Wigs in the Eighteenth Century?’, paper presented to the Warwick Eighteenth-Century Seminar (Mar. 2001); Stana Nenadic, ‘Middle Rank Consumers’, 122–56.

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A Nation of Shoppers

Fig. 6.6. Sir Robert Taylor, 1714–88. Unknown Artist. Detail of buttons. National Portrait Gallery.

to Gillow’s in Lancaster. It was men who ordered the family plate at Parker and Wakelin’s. The Reverend James Woodeford of Norfolk, a bachelor whose niece helped him to run his household, recorded his purchases along with the day’s events in his diary. On a trip to London in September 1789 he bought a dozen silver tablespoons and half a dozen silver dessert spoons at a shop in the Strand for £10; in November he went to Norwich and bought two large double-flapped mahogany tables, a new mahogany washstand, and a second-hand mahogany dressing table with drawers. The furniture at £4 14s. 6d. was a bargain beside his silver spoons, and indeed he declared, ‘I think the whole of it to be very cheap.’¹¹⁹ Another propertied clergyman, William Holland from Somerset, went with his wife to Bath to buy chairs for the best parlour, and was delighted to find ‘six, very elegant, cheap’. Both were sensitive to differences in best and second-hand goods, and Woodeford selected the china and glassware for his table with care.¹²⁰ Men from the lowest rungs of the middling classes, those crossing the boundaries of artisan/craftsman and the middling orders, also took pride in ¹¹⁹ Cited in Finn, ‘Men’s Things’, 141.

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¹²⁰ Ibid. 142.

Men and Women of the Middling Classes their purchases of domestic furnishings as well as books and tools. Francis Place, a working tailor and breeches maker, described the acquisitions during his early married life. He recalled saving for ‘some good clothes and a bedstead, a table three or four chairs and some bedding, and with these and a few utensils we took an unfurnished back room . . . and began to congratulate ourselves on the improvement of our circumstances and the prospect before us.’ Place later bought a mahogany chest of drawers and a mahogany dining table from his landlord, a cabinetmaker, who ‘was paid for these articles partly in money, partly in clothes’.¹²¹ John O’Neil, a London shoeman, worked at two jobs and ‘week after week, I had the satisfaction of seeing something of ornament or utility added to my little establishment, until I could again boast of living as comfortable as most of my acquaintances’.¹²² And Samuel Bamford described his uncle’s house to indicate the levels of prosperity of the weavers during their ‘golden age’. There were a dozen good rush bottom chairs, the backs and rails bright with wax and rubbins, a handsome clock in a mahogany case; a good chest of oaken drawers; a mahogany snap-table; a mahogany corner cupboard, all well-polished; besides tables, weather-glass, cornish and ornaments; pictures illustrative of Joseph and his Brethren, and various other articles indicative of a regard for convenience as well as ornament.¹²³

Women’s association with the buying of china, satirized in the eighteenth century as a symbol of female superficiality and depraved attraction to things, had some basis in gendered consumption. Certainly women were avid consumers of chinaware; they were of great importance to Wedgwood’s success. Their association with chinaware stems from their place in tea drinking. Women occupied a central part in the rituals and symbols of tea drinking. They shopped for chinaware, they ran many of the china shops, and they became noted connoisseurs. But men too played their part. There is widespread evidence in inventories, wills, and diaries of masculine collection of chinaware. Masculine art and print collections and vase mania also attest to this acquisitive consumerism.¹²⁴ And men also sought out ¹²¹ Place, Autobiography, cited in Davies, ‘Rags or Ruffles’, 19. ¹²² John O’Neil, ‘Fifty Years’ Experience of an Irish Shoemaker in London’, St Crispin, 2 (1869), 40; cited in Davies, ‘Rags or Ruffles’, 19. ¹²³ Samuel Bamford, The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford, i: Early Days, ed. W. H. Chaloner (2 vols., London, 1967), 98–9. ¹²⁴ See Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects, 53; Weatherill, ‘A Possession of One’s Own’, 140; Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics (Manchester, 1999), 107–10; Young, English Porcelain, 192–3; S. Nenadic, ‘Print Collecting and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, History, 82 (1997), 203–22; Clayton, The English Print, esp. pp. 25–31, 167–9; J. Uglow, ‘Vase Mania’, in Berg and Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, 151–64.

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A Nation of Shoppers specially chosen gifts, such as Woodeford’s choice of a ‘very genteel corkscrew’ for his neighbour, or a pair of spectacles ‘with a very handsome Tortoise-shell Case and Silver Mounted’ for his brother.¹²⁵ Consumer aspirations across class and gender stimulated the rapid and extensive proliferation of new commodities from the later seventeenth century onwards.The supply-side responses to these aspirations were in turn to generate wider and deeper demand for these goods, bought to satisfy desires for fashion, respectability, sociability, or for convenience and comfort.These new consumer goods were generated through technological change, but above all through product innovation. ¹²⁵ Finn, ‘Men’s Things’, 144; Finn, The Character of Credit, 81–9.

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7


‘Shopping is a Place to Go’: Fashion, Shopping, and Advertising The reasons some of the Fair Sex have for their choice are often very Whimsical and kept as a great Secret. Bernard Mandeville, ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’

Introduction The middling classes made desirable, shopped for, and displayed the new and decorative consumer possessions because they conveyed modernity and distinction. The elites converted their country residences or built new ones; the interiors were revamped according to the latest fashions. New housing for the wealthy in the crescents, lanes, and avenues of London’s West End, or housing for the industrious tradespeople of London’s Clerkenwell and Spitalfields, or Birmingham’s Colemore Row and New Street meant new interior spaces to be furnished. The streets were new public spaces with paving and shops. They provided a stage for inventing, buying, and displaying novelties. The people who came to the new districts of London and the provincial towns and cities bought the props of their interiors; these were goods that had either never existed before or looked completely different from the possessions of older generations. What made these goods desirable above all else was fashion. Fashion was not just a characteristic of women’s clothing; it was a feature of much decorative ware, conveyed through display and use in private and public spaces. The markets for these new goods were not made on price or quality, but on ~ 247 ~

A Nation of Shoppers fashion. Fashion, soon attaching itself to all kinds of ornamental and even everyday articles, was what shoppers sought. Yet fashion has never been taken very seriously as a motivation by economic and social historians. While frequently appealed to by cultural historians, it is rarely defined and almost exclusively associated with dress. For much of the period before the twentieth century, fashion was also considered to be a French achievement. Fashion or ‘Mode’ was a subject of a separate entry in the Encyclopédie; it did not appear in Postlethwayt’s Dictionary of Commerce. M. Chevalier de Jaucourt wrote that pleasure, ornament, frivolity, and wit were key factors generating the expansion of the branches of luxury production. France excelled in this, leading Britain, Germany, and Italy. He also chastised the instability and ephemerality of the fashion trade. France was turning its taste, health, knowledge, and spirit to all that was fantasy, masquerade, lightness, and foolishness.¹ Those British historians who have addressed consumerism have, however, identified fashion as a key transformation of the eighteenth century, and as significant to the British as it was to the French. McKendrick claimed a ‘Western European fashion pattern’ to match the ‘European marriage pattern’.² Where today we perceive consumption in terms of distinction and luxury rather than mass markets, the part played by fashion in the eighteenth-century economy appears far more familiar than it did even twenty-five years ago.³ And we are now closer to conceding its significance for the wider economy; fashionable consumerism stimulated innovation and production in the cotton industry.⁴ British consumerism took its own route to fashion leadership over the course of the eighteenth century, winning out against the well-established reputation of the French for taste, style, and luxury. By the end of the century ‘le goût anglais’ prevailed in European and American markets for decorative and domestic consumer ware, as well as men’s clothing. ¹ Jaucourt, ‘Mode’, 198. See C. Fontaine, ‘The Fashion Trade in the Encyclopédie’ (MA dissertation, University of Warwick, 1998) for a discussion of the many categories in the Encyclopédie where the business of fashion was discussed, including, for example, ‘Commerce’, ‘Joli’, ‘Nouveauté’. See also C. Fontaine, Parcours d’une marchande de modes française en Italie (mémoire de maîtrise, Sorbonne, Paris, 1997). ² Neil McKendrick, ‘The Commercialisation of Fashion’, in McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 34–99, p. 41. ³ J. Schor, The Overspent American (New York, 1998); Frank, Luxury Fever. But see the persistence of mass consumerism models in E. Leopold, ‘The Manufacture of the Fashion System’, in J. Ash and E. Wilson (eds.), Chic Thrills: A Fashion Reader (London, 1992), 101–18, which argues that the proliferation of style in women’s clothes in the early twentieth century can be explained by the industry’s failure to embrace mass production techniques. ⁴ Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’

Defining Fashion and Identifying Consumer Taste Fashion, like luxury, was more frequently discussed by its detractors than by its investigators. Werner Sombart and Thorstein Veblen both treated fashion as an aspect of luxury. Sombart cited an eighteenth-century commentator who said that fashion is ‘a lady . . . of the strangest unconstant Constitution . . . who changes in the twinkle of an eye’; she was introduced to society by her elder brother,Taste, and became the object of the adoration of the crowd. Veblen treated fashion as a wasted substance that might have been better employed.⁵ In seeking its impact on consumer choice and consumer behaviour, we must first define what it is. Economists offer little help here; fashion is just an aspect of taste, a variable or characteristic which they usually assume to be fixed. Sociologists and cultural theorists treat it as another aspect of social manipulation; fashion makes us the creatures of the advertisers, or simply of the habit of following others. Definitions of fashion which connect with new consumer tastes of the eighteenth century address three aspects: the senses, novelty, and imitation. Daniel Roche argues that fashion operated through imitation to bring out the different social habitus of court, town, and people; it revealed the fickleness, artifice, and stratagems of love in human nature; and it confronted the customs, taste, and proprieties of respectable society.⁶ What did the senses, novelty, and imitation mean for the fashioning and retailing of new commodities? Taste addresses the world of the senses: shapes, scents, colours, flavour, and sounds, and it is these senses that affect consumers now, and did so in the past. If we make taste into a variable, and unpack the senses that comprise it, we enter the world of fashion. We also begin to understand why representations of fashion are typically sexualized. Sombart argued that luxury stemmed from sensuous pleasure. Anything that charms the eye, the ear, the nose, the palate, or the touch, tends to find an ever more perfect expression in objects of daily use. And it is precisely the outlay for such objects that constitutes luxury. In the last analysis, it is our sexual life that lies at the root of the desire to refine and multiply the means of stimulating our senses, for sensuous pleasure and erotic pleasure are essentially the same.

He cites Mercier, the acerbic critic of ancien régime Paris, to argue that novelty and pleasure could go too far: ⁵ H. Freudenberger, ‘Fashion, Sumptuary Laws and Business’, in G. Wills and D. Midgley, Fashion Marketing: An Anthology of Viewpoints and Perspectives (London, 1973), 137–46, p. 138. ⁶ Roche, Culture of Clothing, 4.

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A Nation of Shoppers The senses are no longer satisfied; they are jaded. Instead of meeting with stimulating variations, we come face to face with bizarre and nauseating extravagance; this is why everything keeps changing, continually and for no good reason: fashions, dress, customs, manners and speech. The rich soon become insensible to new pleasures. The furnishings of their houses have the character of changeable stage settings; to dress up becomes a real task; their meals are pageants.⁷

The senses provide a first entry into the characteristics of fashionable goods. Only assumed by economists, fashion is explained by psychoanalysts, anthropologists, and linguistic theorists in terms of social function and symbols, codes, links, and systems of communication.⁸ The sensuality of fashion, denounced as it was by Sombart and Mercier, as a pathology of aristocratic wealth, also, however, attracted other social classes. Fashion goods provided ‘sensual arousal’ to the middling and lower classes, inducing people to forgo necessities in order to obtain them.⁹ The gleam of silver and steel caught in the reflection of mirrors; the glitter of crystal glass in candlelight was immediately visually arresting; varnished wood surfaces and light and translucent porcelain felt like special rich materials. Novelty is the second of the three elements of fashion. Scitovsky’s Joyless Economy (1976) outlined the boredom that resulted from a context where all the needs of an organism are satisfied.¹⁰ The pursuit of novelty, by contrast, is pleasurable. Novelty, variety, complexity, and surprise all stimulate arousal. Japanned tea trays were exotic, novel. Cut steel buttons were clever, and to be had in all manner of shapes, sizes, and designs. Fashion is all about caprice and the valorization of ephemerality. The speed of fashion change now is but one aspect of the short shelf-life of products, the velocity of expenditure, and the transience of product images. It seems a commonplace to distinguish fashion from custom and taste. Taste conveys aesthetically based reason, and custom an appeal to comfort or morality. Fashion, by contrast, is associated with the irrational and the impermanent. The novelty represented by fashion in the seventeenth and eighteenth century was a challenge to the status quo and an unchanging social order. It was a choice of an individualist over a hierarchical lifestyle: changes and trends would allow private individuals at least a minimal margin of freedom, choice, and ⁷ Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism, 60–1. ⁸ See M. Bianchi,‘Taste for Novelty and Novel Tastes:The role of Human Agency in Consumption’, in M. Bianchi (ed.), The Active Consumer (London, 1998), 64–86. ⁹ Voth, ‘Work and the Sirens of Consumption’, 163–4. ¹⁰ Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Enquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction (New York, 1976).

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ autonomy in matters of taste.¹¹ It had affected the humble wearers of knitted hosiery in the late sixteenth century; it was even more important to plebeian women in the eighteenth century pawning fashionable French linen hoods and trading their teaware for clothing.¹² The concept of the new was central to fashion; and fashion in turn was an institution which served to introduce novelty into goods considered to have aesthetic significance. But such novelty, initially, was controlled. It entailed a certain amount of freshness and innovation, for the mark of the fashion item was its high turnover; novelty was itself exhausted in the act of consumption.¹³ Novelty, however, also had to be ‘bounded’. Fashion was a skill in containing an otherwise bewildering array and variety of goods and sensations. A novelty had to be recognizable, and tastes developed to appreciate it. Fashionable goods were amenable to imitation, the third element of fashion, and easily networked with other goods. New goods and new characteristics in goods had to be ‘discovered’; their potential had to be noticed and recognized. Vases became fashionable because they evoked familiarity with travel, with a classical past, with complementary interiors and architecture. Medals, especially fashionable in the later eighteenth century, connected their owners to great historical events, political campaigns, or individual achievements. As ornamental accessories they were collectables, ideal presents, and markers of allegiances.¹⁴They were fashionable because they connected with other networks of goods, and with the lifestyles and social identities that framed these objects. Their buyers were like fashion consumers now, drawn to goods that form part of a series: product lines, product families, or ‘winter-autumn collections’ which include clothes, perfumes, and cosmetics.¹⁵ Fashion, and indeed consumerism more broadly, is frequently disparaged as social emulation.¹⁶ But this emulation was more complex than the process of ‘aping one’s betters’. Simmel’s theory of fashion connects directly to a symbolic anthropology of social networks and lifestyle. He defined ¹¹ G. Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, 1994), 23. ¹² Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce. ¹³ C. Campbell, ‘The Desire for the New: Its Nature and Social Location as Presented in Theories of Fashion and Modern Consumerism’ (1992), in D. Miller (ed.), Consumption: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, 4 vols. (London, 2001), i. 246–61, p. 253. ¹⁴ Jones, ‘ “England Expects” ’, 188–9. ¹⁵ P. Earl, Lifestyle Economics: Consumer Behaviour in a Turbulent World (New York, 1986); Bianchi, ‘Taste for Novelty’, 74–5. But see Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC, 1993), 150–66, who connects the collection and the series to the souvenir and the museum. ¹⁶ D. Miller, Material Culture and Mass Consumption (Oxford, 1987); Douglas, Thought Styles, 54–7; Styles, ‘Manufacturing, Consumption and Design’, 535–6.

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A Nation of Shoppers fashion as the coding of objects in order to claim a membership or allegiance.¹⁷ We need to ask to what extent this coding is about the social status or celebrity of those displaying the ‘fashionable’ goods, or to what extent goods themselves are perceived this way. Adam Smith, as we have seen, thought it was not just the object which conveyed fashion, but its association with the high ranking or the rich. They had the confidence to display an object with style; this as much as the physical attributes of an object lent it fashion. Smith assumed annunal changes in clothing styles, and furniture makeovers twice within a decade.¹⁸ Similar views were expressed by the portraitist Allan Ramsay in his Dialogue on Taste (1762). Fashion was ‘habit formed upon caprice’, and a fashion for triangular sleeve cuffs started by a ‘man of ordinary rank’ when the mode is square, would meet with ‘many to despise, but none to imitate him’. But if a man of rank were to take up triangular cuffs, and have them made in a rich fabric, ‘the triangle will then be found to meet with a quite different reception . . . and will soon become an object of imitation’.¹⁹ Hogarth also found style and fashion among those of rank, and explained this association as a grace in movement along the serpentine line. The rich had a graceful carriage attained in exercises in dancing and fencing, but ‘people of rank and fortune generally excel their originals, the dancing-masters, in easy behaviour and unaffected grace; as a sense of superiority makes them act without constraint; especially when their persons are well turn’d’.²⁰ There was, however, something in the objects themselves. Adam Smith pointed out that objects were ‘recognized’ together. ‘When two objects have frequently been seen together, the imagination acquires a habit of passing easily from the one to the other.’The complementarity of two goods increased the attraction of both.²¹ Fashion is also like collecting; seriality is the key. Fashion is packaged not just with clothes, but with accessories, perfumes, and cosmetics, and now with cars and domestic interiors. Merchants and manufacturers reached consumers not through a disembodied idea of novelty, but through careful connection, packaging, and a product cycle. They did so in the eighteenth century, just as they do now. Fashionable products were sold not on caprice, but in the regular framework of the fashion cycle. A product cycle for decorative durable consumer ware followed on the model of the fashion cycle for textiles and clothing, though ¹⁷ Simmel on Culture, 188–9; Douglas, Thought Styles, 121; Campbell, ‘The Desire for the New’, 247. ¹⁸ Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 195. ¹⁹ Allan Ramsay, A Dialogue on Taste (London, 1762), cited in A. Ribeiro, The Art of Dress: Fashion in England and France, 1750–1820 (New Haven, 1997), 20. ²⁰ Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 104. ²¹ Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 194.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ it was by no means so intense and fast moving. The Lyons silk merchants of the late seventeenth century developed design as we have seen, but also the product cycle as a weapon to create barriers to entry, and to extend their share of the international market. Annual fashions were planned and programmed by merchants and manufacturers in advance. Markets controlled from Paris dictated the fashion cycle in silk fabrics. The product cycle was predicated on the constant push of competition from the imitators; theft of designs was endemic to the relation between weavers, fabricants, and merchants. Imitation, emulation, outright copying and design theft acted as both the engine of diffusion of fashion, and as the key incentive to innovation. Approximately nine-tenths of what the Lyonnais produced as samples were copied in Hamburg, Naples, London, Germany, Holland, and Flanders.²² The manipulation of fashion through constant design change gave power to those who could produce a constant run of design innovation, and to those who could respond rapidly to these changes. Defoe complained of ‘French Fashions Pernicious to England’: As soon as those silks came over, our weavers got the fashion, and made silks to the French patterns; but before they could dispose them, the French artfully invented other fashion’d silks which prevented the sale of those made here, and discouraged the English manufactures by changing fashions so often upon them that they could make very little of the silk manufactures.²³

If this was the way that fashion was pursued in the silk industry, it followed suit in the other textile trades, the lead however, taken from London in the case of printed cotton calicoes, from Norwich then Yorkshire in woollens, and from Ireland in linens. Fashion brought not just rapid turnover of designs, but a dramatic increase in the variety on offer, and the materials they could be produced in. Success for manufacturers in this new market depended on ability to anticipate and to create fashions in a range of retail markets, but to keep costs down through bespoke production.²⁴ Technology speeded the fashion cycle, shifting design leads; new printing and dyeing industries imitated Indian calicoes and French silks, making fashion textiles accessible to the middling classes, and through a burgeoning trade in second-hand clothing to the labouring poor as well.²⁵ The more rapid ²² Poni, ‘Fashion as Flexible Production, 37–74, p. 41. Miller, ‘Paris–Lyons–Paris’, 163–5. ²³ Defoe, Complete English Tradesman, cited in Craske, ‘Plan and Control’, 210. ²⁴ J. Smail, Merchants, Markets and Manufacturers: The English Wool Textile Industry in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1999). ²⁵ Beverley Lemire, ‘Second-Hand Beaux and “Red-Armed Belles”: Conflict and the Creation of Fashions in England, c.1660–1800’, Continuity and Change, 15 (2000), 391–417.

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A Nation of Shoppers innovation in Britain than in France in the new calicoes and muslins also prompted a transfer in fashion initiative to Britain in the last quarter of the century.²⁶ Consumer markets so relentlessly driven by fashion were certainly fundamental to textiles and clothing, but so too were they the driving force of innovation in decorative goods. Ceramics, glass, silver and silver plate, furnishings, and carpets all pursued fashion rather than simply luxury markets. Fashion dictated the success of imitative new products made in indigenous materials rather than foreign, in quite different cheaper materials than foreign luxuries, and deploying division of labour and mechanization rather than craft labour. Staffordshire earthenware, English lead glass, Sheffield plate, English light furnishings in mahogany and veneers, Axminster and Kidderminster carpets all scooped home and foreign markets not because they were cheap, but because they were fashion leaders. They tapped into a fashion market already established for French and Asian luxuries—this ‘recognition’ mattered—but then turned to new styles, new products, and new product mixes to produce a fashion item as desirable to the rich as to the humble. Wedgwood’s imitations of French and Asian porcelain broke with the flowered rococo patterns, and created a vogue for plain creamware, and novel imitations of the classical, with his jasper and black basalt ware. Earthenware imitations of Etruscan vases and amphorae were marketed as purveyors of classical virtue and antique art. Turning from French taste, Wedgwood invoked patriotic themes. English glass was a similar imitation turned to new forms and style, lending it a distinctiveness and cachet in international markets.The new English glass was amenable to ‘cutting’ in imitation of German cut glass, and a new luxury and fashion industry emerged during the 1720s in cut glass production—first of expensive dessert dishes and glasses, and later of chandelier glass. They were sold in a whole range of types of glasses from simple beer and cider glasses to English stemmed wine glasses and flowered water glasses, from cheap dram and gin glasses to jelly and sweetmeat glasses, decanters, salvers, and punch bowls.²⁷ Imitative properties were pursued in the enormous array of ornamental metalwares produced in the eighteenth century. Silver plate, steel, brass, gilding, ormolu and pinchbeck, and japanned tinware were deployed in a whole ²⁶ Ribeiro, The Art of Dress, 70, 49; S. Chapman and S. Chassaigne, European Textile Printers in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Peel and Oberkampf (London, 1981). ²⁷ D. Robinson, ‘The Styling and Transmission of Fashions Historically Considered: Winckelmann, Hamilton and Wedgwood in the “Greek Revival” ’, in Wills and Midgley (eds.), Fashion Marketing, 20–35.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ range of new forms. The celebrated Birmingham buckles, buttons, brassware, tea and coffee urns, jewellery, and ‘toys’ were sold in fashion markets. Likewise, Sheffield plate not only opened new middling-class markets for ready-made products, but answered a fashion demand for light, highly ornamented and engraved objects.²⁸ The Paris fashion season that prevailed in the textile and clothing trades found its counterpart in British domestic markets for decorative ware focused on the London season. Seasonal fashion cycles set by both Paris and London dictated production and design schedules for all the accessories and adornments of fashion clothing—metal and ceramic buttons, buckles, jewellery, watches and watch seals, cameos, and snuffboxes. New designs were timed to catch the beginning of the London, and later the Bath seasons. Cut-throat competition among London, Birmingham, and Paris toymen drove a fashion market in ornament. Ornament and commodity groupings provided the crucial lead in much product innovation and fashion marketing during the eighteenth century. It was in this, moreover, that British patenting in new commodities concentrated, and where it had its greatest successes in international markets. The imitative processes of fashion were to be found not just in the seasonal presentation of new designs, and a product cycle focused on recognition; they were also to be found in collections of goods and in the lifestyle images they conveyed. Fashion was made not just by designers, but by retailers and merchants, and by consumers themselves. These engaged in the production process, ornamenting, individualizing, and altering goods, but also through the process of contextualizing goods; they contextualized goods and bought the individual items to make up the sets and combinations.Toyshops, gold- and silversmiths, jewellers, architectural ornament dealers, upholsterers, and furniture shops all contributed to producing the goods they sold. They added fashionable detail, engraved, embellished, and mounted, and even created individualized or one-off items. Retailers and merchants, closely networked with all manner of skilled finishers, could offer the buyer a part in the final look of a good, and could themselves dictate design and contribute to fashion. Fashion goods incorporated the full range of newly invented ornamental detail in cut steel, brass, ormolu, and pinchbeck, and in decorative accessories from buttons and buckles to cameos and medallions. ²⁸ Maxine Berg, ‘Product Innovation in Cove Consume Industries in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, in Maxine Berg and Kristina Bruland (eds.), Technological Revolutions in Europe (Cheltenhum, 1998), 138–60; H. Clifford, ‘Concepts of Invention’.

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A Nation of Shoppers Boulton and Wedgwood both promoted the retail strategy of buying as collecting by developing fashionable collections of medallions, cameos, and vases, with a new design, material colour, or commemoration each season or year which its collector/consumers would add to their series. Furniture makers, upholsterers, and architectural ornament makers developed similar strategies for displaying their goods in fashionable settings, and selling the setting as much as the furniture. Chippendale, the great English furniture maker, and Henry Cheere, the sculptor/businessman with interests in the building trade, cabinetmaking, the manufacture of funerary monuments, fireplaces, and door casements, sold good taste as well as individual items. They acted as ‘upholders’, coordinating a range of specialized trades. The upholder claimed to exhibit a knowledge of which combination of objects met the canons of good taste as well as fast-moving fashion.The context for the rise of the upholder’s profession was rapid stylistic change from the early eighteenth century. The upholder answered the lack of confidence of those of new wealth, but also those of the older aristocracy who might just as easily misjudge the directions of eighteenth-century taste.²⁹ These figures sometimes blended into architect/designers such as Robert Adam. Other London furniture makers, including Linnell, Sheraton, and Gillow, sought fashionable settings to display their wares. Sheraton wrote, ‘When our tradesmen are desirous to draw the best customers to their ware rooms, they hasten to Paris, or otherwise pretext to go there.’³⁰ Fashion was incorporated into decorative ware as it was added to a series, or as it formed part of a new commodity bundle. It formed part of a style, sometimes endowed with masculine or feminine characteristics, and appropriately demarcated by conventions of taste. Building these conventions was about the construction of novelty; as such it was stimulated, as Mary Douglas argues, by hostility towards and the rejection of certain styles.³¹ The commodity bundle chosen by Wedgwood for the presentation of his vases is a case in point. Rejecting the feminine courtly associations of porcelain and rococo designs, he courted ‘elegant simplicity’.³² The vases were displayed on mantelpieces, under history paintings, and set in libraries, dining rooms, and public reception rooms. They symbolized masculine republican virtue, and in their series of imitation materials based on precious stones and ores were sold with the fashion for geological collections. Fashionable decorative ware was sold in the context of room sets and ²⁹ Craske and Berg, ‘Art and Industry’. ³⁰ Craske, ‘Plan and Control’, 208–9; C. Christie, The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, 2000), 236. ³¹ Douglas, Thought Styles, 54. ³² Vickers, ‘Value and Simplicity’, 129–36.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ architecture. Fine linens were correct usage on the tea board. The Adam style became an integrated approach to domestic lifestyle. Neoclassical plasterwork motifs and wallpaper printing designs had strong connections with linen and cotton; like these patterns the new interior designs conveyed lightness. Upholstery, carpets, and portraits were matched or blended into the colour of walls.³³ Boulton and Wedgwood took care to make connections with fashionable architects who then specified their fittings and objets d’art for important houses.³⁴ Fashion thus became a lifestyle choice. All the components and objects of that lifestyle related together; at its heart were the imitative principles of series, collections, recognition, and innovative artifice. We may say that fashion buying is the rich man’s or woman’s choice; the catwalks, supermodels, and celebrities are for most of us a mere fantasy. The fabulous possessions on view in the weekend country house tour or the designer interiors of loft and warehouse living may be the showplace residences of princes and corporate millionaires. But fashion, whether made in the street, or in the spending patterns of the rich, comes to affect the choices of consumers from all social groups. The eighteenth-century pauper pawning his old greatcoat with its large metal buttons knew his loss was one of up-to-date respectable presentation just as did the young aristocrat returning from his grand tour to a country house all out of fashion. These fashionable goods were not just possessed, they were bought. This was the act of shopping.

Shopping Fashion was not just a display; it was an experience. It changed the people who took it up. Those who sought the novel or the strange were not necessarily tastemakers, but they were likely to respond first to a new fashion, and to change their product preferences swiftly; they, not the manufacturers or suppliers, charged the ‘dynamic of modern consumerism’.³⁵ This was consumption as shopping. Buying goods was about going places, meeting the traveller who came from the world outside, taking part in the spectacle of fairs and markets, and above all going out to shops. Fashion and new ³³ B. Collins, ‘Matters Material and Luxurious: Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Irish Linen Consumption’, in J. Hill and C. Lennon (eds.), Luxury and Austerity (Dublin, 1999), 106–20, pp. 112–13. ³⁴ E. L. Jones, ‘The Fashion Manipulators: Consumer Tastes and British Industries, 1660–1800’ in P. J. Uselding (ed.), Business Enterprise and Economic Change (Kent, Oh., 1973), 198–226. ³⁵ Campbell, ‘The Desire for the New’, 254.

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A Nation of Shoppers consumer goods were sold through the full range of market institutions of early modern Europe, through fairs and markets, by hawkers and pedlars, and by catalogue and mail order, as well as in shops, galleries, and auctions. Fairs, markets, and pedlars need to be singled out. No relic of the past, nor an indication of communities only periodically commercial, these were adaptable and innovative institutions for selling new goods. Europe’s fairs in the eighteenth century were cosmopolitan events on an international circuit. They attracted consumers of all social groups across a wide hinterland as well as international travellers, tourists, and financiers. The fairs were spectacles and diversions, providing some of the best settings for promoting new goods. Postlethwayt defined the fair as a ‘concourse of merchants, manufacturers and sundry others of various professions, natives and foreigners who meet yearly or at other fixed times, in some certain place on fixed days to buy and sell; and whither others resort out of curiosity only, to partake of the usual diversions of these public places’. He singled out the impact of the diversions: ‘Though it be not essential to these meetings of traders to have comedians, rope dancers and the like, yet there are few considerable ones without enough of them, and perhaps, is what greatly contributes to the trade of them, the nobility and country gentry flocking to them more for their diversion than what they buy there, which might be had perhaps better and cheaper at home.’³⁶ Even the most fashionable luxuries were sold in the fairs and great markets of Europe. The first successful products of the Meissen Porcelain Works were displayed then sold at the Leipzig fair. Some of France’s most celebrated fairs attracted traders from all over Germany and Italy. The fairs at Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg brought together a ‘vast concourse of princes of the empire, nobility and people, who come to them from all parts of Germany to partake of the diversions to be had’.³⁷ The Frankfurt fair was noted for the sale of all sorts of goods, and especially for the books sold there from Holland, Germany, and Geneva. The Dutch were said to drive a great trade at the fairs in Zurich. They traded painted cloths, muslins, cottons, drugs, woollen cloths and stuffs, tea, chocolate, coffee, spices, and dyestuffs for silks and stuffs made in Switzerland. These were clearly not events to be missed by those with new luxuries to sell. Boulton and Wedgwood, as we have seen, took advantage of the great fairs of Brunswick, Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Nuremberg. These fairs functioned in the eighteenth century in the way that the great international exhibitions, or the more specialized book fairs, clothes, home, or car shows do today. ³⁶ Postlethwayt, ‘Fairs’, Universal Dictionary, vol. i (4th edn., London, 1774).

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³⁷ Ibid.

‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ To be sure, the English fairs by the eighteenth century were more specialized, and focused on agricultural goods and wool. But there were tens of hundreds of them—3,200 in 1756—and ‘chinamen’ and glass stalls were ubiquitous at these fairs.³⁸ The Stourbridge Fair in particular was well known for its glass from Nottingham, its hardware from the west midlands, and cutlery from Sheffield.³⁹ Then there were the pedlars. Just as the fair offered diverting spectacle and entertainment and pleasurable luxury shopping alongside the practical business of agricultural exchange, so too did the pedlars have their special attributes. These were innovative, aggressive, and pushing salesmen and women. They were modern commercial salesmen, using large-scale advertising in the towns they visited as well as trade catalogues, and they extended credit. They offered a personal service. Some might come to the home; if not to the local pub or a neighbour’s front room. Again they were no second-best alternative in communities with few shops; indeed they were most densely concentrated in the midlands and the Home Counties, areas that also had the highest number of shops. Hawkers and ‘Scotch’ pedlars sold fashion goods among their wares all over Britain and Europe: along with drapery they sold haberdashery, ribbons, buckles and buttons, watches and jewellery, snuff boxes, mirrors, and other fancy goods. Glassware was hawked about the country by pedlars carrying it in panniers attached to pack horses. Fine oriental porcelains had long been transported about the country by china men and pedlars; earthenware dealers continued this, though the practice receded in the later eighteenth century.⁴⁰ As we have seen, it was ornament and commodity groupings that provided the crucial lead in much product innovation and fashion marketing during the eighteenth century. And the most popular places to see these on display were shops. Fairs and markets were periodic; pedlars dictated their own comings and goings and used temporary public or private spaces. Shops had fixed premises; they were special purpose, and they could be decorated accordingly; they were public spaces, but small in scale, offering conversational as well as economic exchange. There it was possible to ³⁸ R. B. Westerfield, Middlemen in English Business (1915; repr. Newton Abbot, 1968), 334–9; Hughes, English, Scottish and Irish Table Glass, 49. ³⁹ A. Everitt, ‘The Marketing of Agricultural Produce’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 6 vols., iv: 1500–1640 (Cambridge, 1967), 466–589, p. 537. ⁴⁰ J. Chartres, ‘The Marketing of Agricultural Produce’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), Agrarian History, v: 1640–1750 (Cambridge, 1985), 406–502, p. 420; Fontaine, History of Pedlars in Europe, 183–201; Beverley Lemire, ‘Peddling Fashion’, Textile History, 22 (1991), 67–82; Lorna Weatherill, ‘The Business of Middleman in the English Pottery Trade before 1780’, in R. P. D. Davenport-Hines and J. Liebenau (eds.), Business in the Age of Reason (London, 1987), 51–76, pp. 67–8; Finn, The Character of Credit, 93–5.

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A Nation of Shoppers see the newest, most fashionable items on parade in a concourse of shops in galleries or along new shopping streets. Finding novelties at fairs was replicated on a much larger scale through the extensive range of shops in metropolitan and provincial England. And there were large numbers of shops—far more per head of population than we have now. Excise records for 1759 show a ratio of population to shops for England and Wales of 43.3, and there was an even higher concentration of shops in the south of one shop for every 34 persons.⁴¹ James Bisset made the point on Birmingham shopping in the 1790s: Our Streets are spacious, Buildings neat and clean, As in a trading town were ever seen, And fifteen thousand Houses here you’ll find, With thrice Ten Thousand Shops arrang’d behind.⁴²

New consumer luxuries—china and glassware and all manner of small metal goods, the useful and convenient as well as trifles and fancies—could be found alongside the tea and coffee, chocolate and dried fruits, and other colonial groceries in the small shops of provincial England. Towns like eighteenth-century Chester, Ludlow, and Stamford boasted quality and luxury shops and local craftsmen. Early eighteenth-century Ludlow with only 2,500 people was a place where the gentry could ‘dress fine, live easily, visit much and do things very grand’. And Mrs Read wrote from Chester in 1775 that ‘there is no occasion to be in a violent hurry, for there is always great variety of choice in the shops and full as cheap as what people bring to the fair’.⁴³ The new goods also went with new ways of selling in the toy and china shops of the metropolis, the spas, and larger towns. These centres boasted the most up-to-date ornamental metalwares, jewellery, watches, clocks, glass, and chinaware. Clothes and fabric ranked first—most smaller centres had a draper’s or a mercer’s; shops selling clothing, fabric, shoes, and hats accounted for over half of all shops in the provinces. But they were joined by ironmongers, cabinetmakers, and furniture dealers, silversmiths, toy and china shops. ⁴¹ H. Mui and L. Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1989), 38–9. The south in this case means the area lying south of a line drawn from Lincolnshire on the north-east coast through Leicestershire, Warwickshire, and Gloucestershire to Somerset. ⁴² Bisset, Magnificent Directory, 26. ⁴³ Alan Dyer, ‘Small Towns in England’, in Peter Borsay and Lindsay Proudfoot (eds.), Provincial Towns in Early Modern England and Ireland (Oxford, 2002), 53–67, p. 61; John Stobart, ‘County, Town and Country: Three Histories of Urban Development in Eighteenth-Century Chester’, ibid. 171–94, p. 178.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ New and fashionable consumer goods and the shops they were sold in were celebrated attractions of the metropolis and the spa towns. London shopping was well established from the early seventeenth century in the context of the court, finance, the law, and the mercantile community; the city was already, in Jack Fisher’s words, a ‘centre for conspicuous consumption’. Fashion fed on the London season which by the end of the seventeenth century brought thousands of gentry families to London.⁴⁴ The shopping street also emerged out of the weakness of corporate controls in London; the livery companies retreated from efforts to control production methods. Production processes were dispersed, and division of labour allowed many masters in the luxury trades to become retailers, relying almost entirely on subcontracting. They congregated around the ‘new London’ of the Court and Parliament, with luxury shops around the squares of Westminster and the streets for a mile around St Paul’s. These areas extended from the early eighteenth century to Cheapside, Fleet Street, and the Strand, or to Holborn, Leicester Fields, and Covent Garden. John Gay set the topography to verse: Who would of Watling-street the dangers share, When the broad pavement of Cheapside is near? . . . Or who that rugged street would traverse o’er, That stretches, or Fleet-ditch, from thy black shore To the Tower’s moated walls? . . . Oh bear me to the paths of fair Pall-Mall! Safe are thy pavements, grateful is thy smell! . . . Shops breathe perfumes, through sashes ribbons glow, The mutual arms of ladies and the beau.⁴⁵

From the mid-eighteenth century there was a relentless shift westward to Piccadilly and St James’s. A London directory at the end of the century declared ‘The West End of the Town is the Most Modern’.⁴⁶ Improvements in the public spaces of shopping and its physical plant enhanced the context for pleasure shopping. The streets of the City were widened and improved after the Lighting and Paving Acts from 1760 onwards; signboards were banned after 1762, further lightening and opening the streets, and pushing shop advertisement into a glittering or profuse array ⁴⁴ F. J. Fisher, ‘The Development of London as a Centre of Conspicuous Consumption in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, in E. M. Carus Wilson (ed.), Essays in Economic History, ii (London, 1962), 197–207. Also see Jones, ‘The Fashion Manipulators’. ⁴⁵ John Gay,’The Streets of London’ (1715), in Trivia, and Other Poems, 25–6. ⁴⁶ Clifford, Silver in London, ch. 3, pp. 44–7.

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A Nation of Shoppers of goods in newly glazed shop windows.⁴⁷ William Hutton, in his account of his journey to London in 1785, found London’s street lighting, dramatic though it was, totally outclassed by its entrancing shops: Not a corner of this city is unlighted. They have everywhere a surprising effect . . . at the west end of the town . . . the sight is most beautiful. But this innumerable multitude of lamps affords only a small quantity of light, compared to the shops. By these a whole city enjoys a nocturnal illumination . . . I have counted 22 candles in one little shop . . . The stranger will naturally suppose they cost nothing, or that money flows in with the same ease as the tide, and that a fortune is burnt up every night.⁴⁸

Neither were shopping streets specialized by trade—they offered a variety of goods and experience. The casual shopper wandering down Panton Street between St Martin’s Lane and Haymarket encountered Garrod’s the goldsmith’s, Elizabeth Carpenter’s the pewterer’s, then Hudson’s the chemist’s. Along from these there were Parker’s silversmithing workshop, a perfumier’s next door, then a public house and a bakery. At the end of the street there was the Great Room, a space for exhibitions, lectures, and spectacles. The south side of the street had a pawnbroker, a cabinetmaker and glover, a glazier, a brandy merchant, and milliners and mercers.⁴⁹ Birmingham’s streets were also noted as ‘pav’d’ in Bisset’s Directory, ‘but all the stones Are set the wrong way up, in shape of cones . . . Strangers limp along the best pav’d street . . . whilst custom makes the Natives scarcely feel Sharp pointed pebbles press the toe or heel.’ The paving stones notwithstanding, Birmingham High Street in the 1790s had a hardware and toyman, three woollen drapers and mercers, a druggist, a shoe warehouse, a stocking and lace warehouse, a hatter, two printers and booksellers, an auctioneer, two grocers, a glove warehouse, a tea and spice dealer, a goldsmith and jeweller, a carver and gilder, and a type founder. But shops themselves were not enough. Birmingham had no pretensions to fashion leadership. Catherine Hutton, generally sober enough in her middling-class tastes, wrote to her friend Mrs André in London: ‘I have laughed twenty times at your idea of enquiring after the fashion at Birmingham, a place celebrated neither for fashion nor taste. We are showy enough, but nothing more. It is from you that I must learn the fashion . . .’ She had no qualms in asking another friend in London to buy her a hat: ‘a fashionable, plain black riding hat . . . ⁴⁷ Berry, ‘Polite Consumption’, 382. The designs of the shopfronts are described in Kathryn Morrison, English Shops and Shopping (New Haven, 2004), 43–5. ⁴⁸ William Hutton, A Journey from Birmingham to London (Birmingham, 1785), 22–3. ⁴⁹ Clifford, Silver in London, ch. 3, p. 47.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ One might suppose that one plain hat would be very like another; yet there is a style, a manner, in a London hat which our untutored hats in the country cannot equal.’⁵⁰ Shopping was also a tourist experience in the fashionable spa towns which catered to an annual influx of gentry and middling-class temporary residents, staying for various lengths of time. Even in the 1760s and 1770s Bath was the place to go for cutting-edge fashion items. It had showrooms and galleries of the leading toymakers and design chinaware from Cox’s to Wedgwood items. By the 1790s when Johanna Schopenhauer toured about, Cheltenham had elegant houses, handsome shops, lending libraries, and coffee shops. Brighton was a place for ‘elegant little shops where London merchants sell their prettiest and most exclusive fashions’, and Buxton had a magnificent crescent with elegant shops.⁵¹ The shop displays and interiors were just as diverting. Retailing itself was a fashion. Shops became warehouses, galleries, auctions, emporia, bazaars—indeed a new leisure activity. Beyond that global emporium of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London, the Royal Exchange, there were the goldsmiths’ rows and the toyshops that matched the mercers and drapers. These were shops of a different order. Large, well lit, and decorated with counters to lay out goods, and with mirrors and windows, they were permanent fixtures, and set prices in advance. They were designed like the goods inside them to attract the fashionable shopper. London’s luxury shops had long been commented on. The Female Tatler in 1709 described the drapers’ shops on Ludgate Hill as ‘perfect gilded theatres’. Defoe denounced the high-class pastry shops of the 1720s for their gilding, painting, and carving. Fittings for display—glass cases and cupboards, nests of drawers and show boards—conveyed quantity and choice of goods. Metropolitan glass sellers were substantial tradesmen in the first half of the eighteenth century, charging £20 for apprenticeships, and spending £200–500 stocking their shops.⁵² New attention went to selling goods in seductive domestic interiors; shops selling all manner of fashion goods were furnished with mirrors and pictures, tables and chairs, and candlelighting. In the luxury trades, meticulous attention went into display devices and lavish containers to designate quality; others showed off wares in open shelves and show boards. Counters provided a set for a show of unwrapping ⁵⁰ Bissett, Magnificent Directory, 27, plate D. Catherine Hutton Beale (ed.), Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last Century: Letters of Catherine Hutton (Birmingham, 1891), 29, 36. ⁵¹ Cited in Nancy Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing, 1550–1820 (Aldershot, 2000), 71–2. ⁵² Hughes, English, Scottish and Irish Table Glass, 64.

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A Nation of Shoppers goods for the customer. Great precision was applied in these eighteenthcentury shops to targeting the fashion consumer. Indeed shopkeepers were important as clients and not just as suppliers to the ‘upholders’ who also designed and furnished the interiors of country houses and fashionable London residences.⁵³ The stock and display of these shops were perceived not only as a ‘theatre of the streets’, but as pavement education.The tourists saw the shops as part of their cosmopolitan education. Sophie von la Roche recorded not selfindulgence but self-improvement as she surveyed the displays. She was ‘struck by the excellent arrangement and system which the love of gain and the national good taste have combined in producing, particularly the elegant dressing of large shop windows, not merely to ornament the streets and lure purchasers, but to make known the thousands of inventions and ideas, and spread good taste about, for the excellent pavements made for pedestrians enable crowds of people to stop and inspect the new exhibits’. Carl Philip Moritz, visiting London in 1782, found ‘no need for elementary primers and prints for the education of children: you can take them about the street and show them all the things themselves . . . Paintings, machines, precious objects—all can be seen advantageously displayed behind great clear-glass windows . . . Such a street often resembles a well-arranged show-cabinet.’⁵⁴ There was even a tourist route set out in the guidebooks by the most spectacular shops; these included Wedgwood’s warehouse in St James’s Square, Tassie’s artificial stone shop in Leicester Square, and Hatchett’s coach manufactory in Long Acre.These shops with their large plate glass windows and fine displays were another British achievement. Von Archenholz, another traveller, in 1789 declared, ‘Nothing can be more superb than the silversmiths shops . . . the greatest shops in St. Honoré at Paris appear contemptible compared with those in London.’⁵⁵ The plate glass windows were a priority for success. Even the dour Francis Place, who had struggled so hard to put together his most basic house furnishings, and who always took such care over his savings, in 1801 congratulated himself on the elegant plate glass windows of his new tailor’s shop at Charing Cross. Each pane of glass had cost him three pounds, and he boasted, ‘I think mine were the largest plate-glass windows in London.’⁵⁶ ⁵³ Claire Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-Century London’, Journal of Design History, 8 (1995), 157–76, pp. 160–7; S. Foster, ‘Going Shopping in 18th-Century Dublin’, Things, 4 (1996), 36–62, pp. 45–8; Morrison, English Shops and Shopping, 34–40. ⁵⁴ Both passages are cited by Clifford, Silver in London, ch. 3. ⁵⁵ Ibid. ⁵⁶ Cited in Berry, ‘Polite Consumption’, 383.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ Where did these retailing formats come from? Earlier pleasure and fashion shopping had centred on the Royal and New Exchange where balconies, stairways, and walkways framed nearly 200 little boutiques selling expensive haberdashery, perfume, jewellery, china, and books. They conveyed wealth and fashionability—places to go and places to be seen. Their popularity declined later in the century with the shift westward in fashionable shopping districts, but their social exclusivity also limited their expansion and adaptability to absorb a new range of consumer goods and the middling-class shoppers now leading the way. The shops also drew on long traditions of selling exotic, oriental, and especially china ware in the china shops, showrooms, the East India Company sales, and London’s auction houses which were fashionable rendezvous for nobility and gentry. The showrooms, periodic supercargo and other merchant sales, and auctions led into the fashion and showroom selling best exemplified by the porcelain and fine earthenware dealers, and described in detail by Wedgwood. As we have seen, Wedgwood thought of his galleries as an exhibition. Competing with other luxury retailers he tried to convey a sense of restrained and aesthetic repose amongst the excess represented by other luxury traders. He thus sought ‘to moderate the shew’ at the first entrance. The East India Company also inspired fashion warehouse selling. Shoppers responded to the perceived exotic and cosmopolitan origins of the auction and warehouse. Many associated the warehouse with fashion selling, high turnover, and good prices. All social classes appreciated a good price, and fashion was spread on price competition. Wedgwood himself set up warehouses and showrooms in Bath, Liverpool, and Dublin, recognizing that there was no strict division between a ‘warehouse’ and a showroom. But the warehouse generally meant a different kind of fashion retailing. From the 1730s in London it meant a large shop, high turnover, bulk selling, and low prices. Its principle was deliberate low pricing to encourage rapid renewal of stock, and to keep abreast of fashions. Warehouse selling of ready-made clothing, especially cotton petticoats, caps, and shirts as well as shoes and hats, goes back at least to the 1760s, developing alongside the cotton industry.The cotton boom of the 1780s and 1790s was the golden age of drapery warehouses. Warehouse selling complemented the East India Company sales and auctions, and fast-paced selling targeted a priceconscious middling-class market. The warehouse connection with the East India Company and the association of a profusion of luxury ware arriving at long intervals established a connection between fashion retailing and the warehouse principle.The toymen, those retailers of fashionable ornamental goods obtained from the industrial workshops of London, the midlands, ~ 265 ~

A Nation of Shoppers and south Yorkshire, stocked warehouses in Bath with fashion goods displayed in glass showcases. Concentrations of warehouses in spa towns such as Bath played the same role as do the designer discount outlet and seasonal sales now, in spreading fashion buying across the middling classes.⁵⁷ What the shops overtly offered the shoppers turned to their own advantage. Buying became a skill, a form of enlightened knowledge.The shop was a public space for mixed sociability, a setting for developing gesture, manners, and conversation. It was an experience of private fantasy and imagined desire. Shops, warehouses, auctions, and galleries might offer an array of attributes—seductive interiors, entertaining and social places to see and to be seen, good prices and the latest stock—but their success depended on the responsiveness of consumers. Successful shopping, especially that for superfluous, fashionable consumer ware, depended on mood, emotion, psychological response, and social interaction. None of these responses could be significantly controlled by supplier, retailer, or advertiser, though they made efforts to affect them. As Michel de Certeau argues in The Practice of Everyday Life, the perception and use of the retail setting by consumers could be very different from that intended by suppliers. There was also a big difference between day-by-day household provisioning and the pleasure or leisure shopping which underpinned the purchase of much decorative consumer ware. But even this shopping was divided into the serious decision-making behind purchases of larger or more expensive pieces of furniture, family decisions on dinnerware, tea equipages, and dynastic silverware and more trifling decisions on haberdashery, buckles, snuff boxes, or jewellery. Fashion was important to consumers of all these goods, but a sense of taste and style was more significant for some items than the mere fun and diversion of fashion buying. Good taste was also defined by context both regional and social. As Vickery has noted, the elite families of Lancashire bought their furniture not in London, but in Lancaster from Gillow’s, and the larger expensive pieces, bought to last a lifetime, were purchased in long-planned shopping expeditions by the men of the family.⁵⁸ Shopping expeditions to furnish a family home were important memories of small tradesmen and artisans looking back on their early years. They recalled shopping and decisions made together with their wives in buying the furniture that went into making a home. James Bisset, ⁵⁷ McKendrick, ‘Commercialization of the Potteries’, 120; Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, 185–96; T. Fawcett, ‘Bath’s Georgian Warehouses’, Costume, 26 (1993), 32–8; Eric Robinson, ‘Eighteenth-Century Commerce and Fashion: Matthew Boulton’s Marketing Techniques’, Economic History Review, 16 (1963–4), 39–60. ⁵⁸ Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 167.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ Francis Place, and Joseph Gutteridge all described the early years of their family lives as years of acquiring their furnishings and household goods together. Francis Place remembered early years of privation followed by better incomes when they ‘could buy some good clothes and a bedstead, a table three or four chairs and some bedding’ to set up in ‘an unfurnished back room’. He later paid for a mahogany chest of drawers and dining table, partly in money, and partly in clothes.⁵⁹ Joseph Gutteridge and his wife bought the furniture to ‘get a comfortable home together’.⁶⁰ Recent writing on shopping has tried to regain for it the moral high ground, a locus of serious endeavour at least as important as production. In this interpretation, shopping was about knowledge, judgement, and skill; it was part of household management, the ‘work’ of women; it was about social inclusion and exclusion. Sociological and anthropological explanations ascribe all manner of functions to shopping. Much of this writing seeks to disconnect shopping from its long association with luxury, but consumers in the eighteenth century shopped, as now, with many different motivations and sensations.⁶¹ First, shopping was a practice based in knowledge. Good shoppers were ‘experienced’. They knew prices and qualities, how to bargain, where to go. Shopping provided an opportunity for an exchange of knowledge. Buying at a good price was not just a concern of the middling classes, but of the elites; success in this transaction was an achievement. Shopping determined how prices were set, and that these did not for long diverge too greatly from value, that is, overall costs of production. As Adam Smith argued, the exchange of the product of one type of labour for another was based not in any external measure, but in the practice of the real market place. The ‘higgling and bargaining of the market’, in other words shopping, was the ‘sort of rough equality which, though not exact, is sufficient for carrying on the business of common life’.⁶² Knowledge-based shopping was also about information suited to different types of shopping, and knowing how to use the full variety of the retail environment. Thus Nigel Thrift describes this practice as a form of ‘social knowledge’, the building up of banks of knowledge about different shops, ⁵⁹ Place, Autobiography, 111, 124. ⁶⁰ Joseph Gutteridge, ‘Lights and Shadows in the Life of an Artisan’, in V. E. Chancellor (ed.), Master and Artisan in Victorian England (London, 1969), 75–238, p. 123. ⁶¹ See D. Miller, Peter Jackson, et al., Shopping, Place and Identity (London, 1998); Douglas, Thought Styles. For historical treatments conveying these positions see Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, and C. Walsh, ‘Shopping in Early-Modern London c.1660–1800’ (Ph.D. thesis, European University Institute, Florence, 2001), 39–42. ⁶² Smith, Wealth of Nations, ii. 49.

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A Nation of Shoppers ranking these, and using what was best for a designated activity or purchase.⁶³Knowledge was not, however, just a practice, but a possession and a commodity. For knowledge was not just deployed in performing useful shopping. It was also celebrated as something to buy. Products became fashionable because they contained ‘knowledge’. While ‘useful knowledge’ conveyed across networks of artisans, inventors and producers contributed to the production of an ‘industrial Enlightenment’, the resulting newly invented products conveyed these attributes to the shopper. Precision tooling, accurate timekeeping, or clever mechanics were not needed by many of the buyers of watches, clocks, scientific instruments, automata, toys, and hardware. But they were attractive, desirable, and a connection with ‘modern’ useful knowledge. Shopping for such items was a participation in performance, spectacle, and scenes of laboratory and workshop life.⁶⁴ Second, though shopping might be about knowledge, it was also the practice of sociability. Elaborate shop fittings and priority locations provided sites of sociability as much as settings for the display of goods. Certainly luxury and many other consumer goods could be bought by mail order; carrier services could deliver goods to many places on any day of the week in the later eighteenth century. Elite consumers might deal with shopkeepers through their stewards, their housekeepers, or other servants. And indeed many practised proxy shopping for particular things, especially if bought in London or abroad, through relatives or friends. But one of the key points about shops for luxury and new consumer goods, and new shopping areas, was that this was a place to go with friends and relations. Elite women integrated morning shopping trips into daily routines which often included visiting in the afternoons. From early in the eighteenth century Defoe noticed the evening and Saturday shopping of tradespeople and the middling classes who combined socializing with spending freely.⁶⁵ As Claire Walsh has argued, the early shopping galleries were places for an outing, and spaces to meet friends. This association continued with the shops. Shopping among women of the wealthier middle classes in London and the provincial towns was part of the rhythm of the day, the first pursuit of the morning after breakfast. And they shopped, like Annabella and Harriet Carr in Newcastle, with friends and family.⁶⁶ Friends provided support, instructed ⁶³ Peter Jackson and Nigel Thrift, ‘Geographies of Consumption’, in Miller, Acknowledging Consumption, 204–38. On shopping knowledge see Walsh, ‘Shopping in Early-Modern London’, 189. ⁶⁴ See the discussion of useful knowledge in Mokyr, Gifts of Athena, ch. 2. Also see Lisa Roberts, ‘A World of Wonders, a World of One’, in P. H. Smith and Paula Findlen (eds.), Merchants and Marvels (London, 2002), 399–411; Jim Bennett, ‘Shopping for Instruments in Paris and London’, ibid. 370–98. ⁶⁵ Berry, ‘Polite Consumption’, 379; Defoe, Plan for the English Commerce, 77. ⁶⁶ Berry, ‘Polite Consumption’, 380.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’

Fig. 7.1. Wedgwood & Byerley Showrooms on York Street near St James’s Square, London, showing customers browsing amongst open displays. Ackerman, Repository of the Arts, 1809, Trustees of the Wedgwood Museum, Staffordshire (England).

on taste, helped with decisions, and assisted in discussion with the shopkeeper over price and terms of credit. The shops were public spaces accommodating women who might browse, linger, converse, encounter, or men passing by on the way to something else or making an occasion of a possible purchase.⁶⁷ The astute retailer accommodated this function. Wedgwood divided spaces with their counters intended for buying from areas set aside for browsing and socializing. Other shops dealt with some customers at counters in the front of the shop, but with a more select clientele in more domestic settings at the back.⁶⁸ Shopping also had its underworld. All the accoutrements of shop displays, showcases and windows, the wide pavements, and the encouragement to browsers also tempted the shoplifter. And opportunities abounded in shops, which witnesses at the Old Bailey described as full of customers waiting to be served, some with anything from a dozen to sixty vying for the attention of the shopkeeper and her attendants.⁶⁹ Shopkeepers expected to sell to their customers in a context of sociability, both as an agreeable meeting place offered to groups of customers, ⁶⁷ Walsh, ‘Shopping in Early-Modern London’, 42, 55–7, 65–78. Finn, The Character of Credit, 90–2. ⁶⁸ Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 101. ⁶⁹ Deirdre Palk, ‘Private Crime in Public and Private Places: Pickpockets and Shoplifters in London, 1780–1823’, in Hitchcock and Shore (eds.), The Streets of London, 135–50, p. 136.

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A Nation of Shoppers but also as social interaction between shopkeeper and customer.Thus shopping became another framework for civility and politeness. Deportment and dress mattered to the shopkeeper; skill in ‘reading’ customers’ needs, and judgement on creditworthiness were vital to success.⁷⁰The shopkeeper was thus frequently subject to satire—overdressed, oversociable, foppish, and flirtatious.⁷¹ But attracting customers into the shop was a principal hurdle; after this it was turning agreeable conversation into a sale. For the shopper who also dressed to shop, there was the sense of a bargain or novelty to outdo her friends, or the whim to pass on to another shop.⁷² While direct verbal encounter and tactile experience of the goods might well govern final choice over whether or not to buy, the shop window and advertising played crucial parts in fuelling the fantasy and imagination driving the dynamic of fashion consumerism. Colin Campbell has argued: ‘The enjoyment associated with imaginative pleasures is experienced as superior in quality (if not intensity) to that encountered in actuality . . . This kind of hedonism requires advanced psychic skills and is dependent on the development of literacy, privacy and the development of a modern conception of the self.’⁷³ Advertising was more subtle than the direct experience of the shop. It fed on fantasy and daydreams, creating the experience of desire itself. It was about feeding anticipation, not about the actual consumption. It is to this hidden inner world, Campbell argues, that much advertising directs its message, ‘encouraging consumers to believe that the novel products described may indeed serve to make their dreams come true’.

Advertising The retailing of new consumer goods was absolutely dependent on advertising. Advertising at the time was no primitive forebear of the subliminal sophistication of modern advertising, so pervasive in our contemporary culture that it is a form of ‘mass delusion’. Advertising, even in the early decades of the eighteenth century, was an economic and cultural activity in its own right. It successfully capitalized on the imitative impulses at the heart of fashion, connecting image and text across different parts of print culture. Few have celebrated the virtues of advertising, yet advertising formed a part of the making of new consumer goods; it was an aspect of product innovation. It is time to return to McKendrick’s celebration of the commercial ⁷⁰ ⁷¹ ⁷² ⁷³

Berry, ‘Polite Consumption’, 388. Ibid. 388–90. See also Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society. Mandeville, ‘A Search into the Nature of Society’, in The Fable of the Bees, ed. Harth, 355. Campbell, ‘The Desire for the New’, 259; Agnew, ‘Coming up for Air’, 25.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ puff, and the wider world of eighteenth-century advertising. McKendrick argued that advertising helped the inventor to make his new product fashionable and accessible; it was an aspect of the democratization of eighteenth-century society. Newspaper advertising was part of the wider world of commercial puffs in spectacles, shops, showrooms, galleries, and auctions; these venues themselves were forms of advertising. Such advertising extended out to commercial dictionaries and journals, ‘scientific’ pamphlets and ‘how to do’ manuals, and literary periodicals and almanacks. New commodities, services, and ways of consuming and behaving were ‘advertised’ as useful knowledge. The designed product as an object was also a form of advertising, marketing, and promotion. It might be a one-off design, sold to a patron, but exhibited first; it might be a particular line of goods, such as Wedgwood’s jasper ware, or Boulton’s serialized medallions which branded the name, and subsequently ‘sold’ all other lines of the firms’ products.⁷⁴ Integrated within this wide promotional culture, the printed advertisement deployed standard tropes, responded to spectacle and event, and drew the reader into a universe of novelty, profusions of goods, and fashionable display. Just how were new consumer goods advertised within eighteenthcentury print culture? The key forms of advertising were the small ads in metropolitan and provincial newspapers, the illustrated trade card or bill head, and trade catalogues. London by 1760 had four daily newspapers; its major periodicals date back to the 1730s including the Gentleman’s Magazine and the Monthly Magazine. These were to be joined later by the Universal Magazine and the Monthly Review, the Critical Review, and the Connoisseur.These periodicals addressed issues of national and international taste, and by the 1730s daily news sheets and advertisers in England devoted 50 per cent of their space to advertisements. Extensive fashion dress advertisements appeared in a range of women’s almanacks and fashion magazines from the early eighteenth century. McKendrick has pointed out the rapid expansion of these metropolitan and provincial newspapers and the dazzling variety of their advertisements. At one level these advertisements were vigorous campaigns, and deployed elaborate hyperbole. At another level provincial newspapers were filled with prosaic announcements and large numbers of advertisements for patent medicines and books,but not all that many for other goods.⁷⁵Aris’s Gazette in ⁷⁴ McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 34–92; A. Wernick, Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression (London, 1991), 6–18. ⁷⁵ McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 152–3; Styles, ‘Manufacturing, Consumption and Design’, 541; Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 108–9.

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A Nation of Shoppers Birmingham carried announcements with all the standard selling terms. Some sold ‘every article in the Japan trade’, others had tin-plate kitchen ware ‘made after a new method’; there were some with tea urns ‘of the most elegant and approved taste’, and many with ‘large and well-selected assortments of foreign and English’ goods.⁷⁶But the number and variety of these advertisements increased out of all proportion to population growth. The Salisbury Journal, servicing an area of relatively stable population growth, saw its advertisements rise from an annual average of 296 in the 1730s to 1,350 in the 1750s and ever upwards to 2,500 in the 1760s and 3,300 in 1770.These promoted not only books, medicines, boarding schools, and housing, but promised delivery to readers of tea, dyed silks, hats, and silver watches.⁷⁷ It was graphic advertisement, however, especially as conveyed in trade cards and trade catalogues, that provided the greatest opportunity for advertising new goods. Graphic advertisement existed in the form of the bill heading and trade cards; many of the graphic designs in these also extended on occasion to gazetteers and trade directories. Few historians, however, have recognized these as forms of advertisement, imparting graphic messages. They conveyed images of a wide variety of consumer goods, and symbols and representations of services and shops. They did not appear in newspapers; nor were they often freely distributed in the street.The engravings on which they were based were very expensive and each imprint would have been of some value. They were certainly used on bills and letters of account to existing customers, but were also probably used on correspondence to customers and potential new customers, announcing new addresses, arrivals of new ranges of goods.This was not mass advertising, but closely targeted advertising focused on local, metropolitan, national, and international customers, on other tradesmen, and on other merchants. To the historian now looking at these cards, they present an arresting combination of text and image. Did this make them more effective advertising? These documents demonstrate that our current impressions of being bombarded at every turn in public and in private by advertising and publicity are no new departure. Samuel Johnson complained in the mideighteenth century, ‘advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it therefore becomes necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic’.⁷⁸ At its best, the trade card was ‘informative’ and persuasive. ⁷⁶ Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 30 Oct. 1796; 30 July 1798. ⁷⁷ C. Y. Ferdinand, ‘Selling it to the Provinces: News and Commerce round Eighteenth-Century Salisbury’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Goods, 393–411, pp. 398–9.

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Fig. 7.2. Trade card of James Wheeley’s paper-hanging warehouse, Little Britain, London, c.1760. British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, Banks and Heal Collection.

It provided a way of informing customers of the location and address of the shop and a list of goods in which it dealt. It also conveyed information in wider ways by teaching the consumption of novelty. The texts of lists of goods and their images transmitted skills of identifying networks of goods and the lifestyles framing these.The cards were guides for consumer choice. In providing information they offered judgement; the text and image invited the buyer into a conversation on choice, accessories, ornament, and adaptation. They engaged, interacted with the consumer; they were indeed part of the ‘economy of persuasion’.⁷⁹ ⁷⁸ McKendrick, Brewer, and Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society, 148. ⁷⁹ D. N. McCloskey, Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge, 1994), 367–78. This discussion of trade cards is developed in greater depth in M. Berg and H. Clifford, ‘Selling consumption in the 18th century: Advertising and the trade card in Britain and France’, www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/ knowconsumer.html.

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A Nation of Shoppers The trade card, probably above all other types of contemporary advertisement, became part of the representation of the physical properties of goods. Not just the good it announced, but the advertisement itself became an object of consumption. This was one of those ways in which consumers made their own responses to advertising; they read, used, enjoyed, and possessed the advertisement in multiple ways, buying sometimes because they liked the advertisement.⁸⁰ Indeed these cards, in England especially, were from an early stage collected; Pepys in the 1660s and 1670s collected large numbers. Viscount Torrington pasted some of his printed tavern bills into his journal, commenting on illustrations of punch bowls, bottles, and glasses. They exist in archives and collections today in their thousands, a startling testimony to the rich visual imagery of eighteenth-century promotional culture. Yet this graphic commerce and advertising more generally are neglected aspects of the contemporary consumer culture. Obviously the cards manipulated customers; enticing illustrations on the cards combined fantasy and reality.They lent a ‘vivacity’ to the printed word and image. The cards offered personal connection, for they were usually associated with a shop. In some cases they were given in the shop, thus functioning as a souvenir or gift, and a memory of shopping. In other cases they went out with accounts, bills, and notices to existing and new customers.The trade cards were highly cosmopolitan.They were not about the local; they conveyed to their clientele a place in an international consumer culture. They provided graphic demonstrations of the way in which goods should be consumed, sometimes presenting shop settings, sometimes access to scenes and conventions of polite society. Above all they provided the pleasure and entertainment of the print. Imagery and fictions are signifiers of the advertising of today, with close attention given to design, layout, contrast, and striking or unusual imagery. Advertisers play on the seductive draw of fantasies of possible worlds. They appeal to the pleasures of looking. These eighteenth-century advertisements used the opportunity offered by graphic print culture, especially as this exploited the new technology of metal engraving for sophisticated visual description.The elaborately engraved card suggested quality of material and fine design of the goods advertised. The cards could amuse and engage the consumer by unconventional use of images familiar across other types of print culture. Images frequently conveyed the novel or the newly ⁸⁰ See M. Nava, ‘Framing Advertising’, in M. Nava, A. Blacke, I. McRury, and B. Richards, Buy this Book: Studies in Advertising and Consumption (London, 1999), 34–50.

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‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ invented, and these referred not to the individual product, but to the universe of commodities, or to fashion or modernity. Images sometimes exhibited exotic or luxurious consumer goods beside useful, precision tools. Text was often framed by recognizable images of ornament and design, by rococo mirror frames, or neoclassical columns, and might also include wellknown national emblems. These were all images familiar to the educated eye of polite society. The elaborate rococo frames dripping with all manner of goods, such a popular format in these cards in the middle of the eighteenth century, gave way in the last third of the century to much simplified images, neoclassical designs, abbreviated text, and more white space. Commerce was thus presented as a stable cultural force.⁸¹ Not just image, but also text had a special format. Specific phrases and word groupings were used again and again. Pseudo-factual words were used beside specific facts to convey notions of information and honesty. Advertising tropes all made use of ‘novelty’, ‘best quality’, ‘variety’, ‘all sorts’, ‘elegant’, ‘superb taste’. A common presentation was lists of goods with extensive use of nouns. Text was set out in regulation type sizes using similar spacing, rules, and white spaces, but different typefaces were often used for specific words. The effect of this was to make the word more visual. If we turn to some of these individual cards we see the characteristics that attracted both consumer and collector. Two trade cards from the 1730s and 1740s (Figures 7.2 and 7.3) deployed elaborate rococo frames. James Wheeley advertised his paper-hanging warehouse with a shop interior showing a family selecting rolls of wall paper under the informed advice of the shopkeeper. Five different typefaces in the advertisement drew attention to ‘all sorts’, ‘great variety’, ‘ornaments’, and ‘matched’ furniture. Dunkerley & Cocking’s, a tin-plate workers’ shop in St Martin’s Lane, also used its rococo frame and different typefaces to good effect. It advertised a variety of goods and activities, ‘all sorts of tin wares, lamps lighted and lamp oil’,‘fine Spermaceti Oil, and its service’,‘Copper & Brass tinn’ed in the best Manner’. The branches of the frame hold a variety of lamps. If we move on to cards of the later eighteenth century, these make greater use of classical imagery. An example is James Bernardeau, razor maker and cutler in Drury Lane, London. Ornate script advertises that he makes and sells razors, scissors, penknives, lancets, and other instruments, as well as knives and forks with a variety of handles. His address, ‘at the Pistol & L’, is ⁸¹ Julia Muir, ‘Printing Persuasion: Advertising Goods in Eighteenth-Century England’ (MA dissertation, V&A/Royal College of Art, 2000), 158.

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Fig. 7.3. Trade card, Dunkerley & Cocking’s tin-plate workers. John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library.

incorporated as an emblem to form a centrepiece to the imagery of the card, and putti, surrounded by garlands, display a board with images of his products, again with the emblem of his address at the centre.The text of this card is also translated into French at the bottom, possibly to communicate with his foreign customers, but certainly also to convey his aristocratic clientele. Finally, the trade card for Edward Thomason, adapted from the engraving in James Bisset’s Directory, advertises his inventions, his exports of modern toys, and his patriotism. His central images are a coach, an image of a ~ 276 ~

‘Shopping is a Place to Go’ large and well-appointed warehouse, and an emblem of the lion and unicorn. The coach advertises his ‘Patent steps for Carriages’. These are displayed in the image and text. Incorporated into the design is another image of a patent, and text about his ‘patent cocks for gun & pistol locks’. Text setting out Thomason’s address in Birmingham emphasizes in a different typeface his ‘Exportation’ of ‘all kinds’ of ‘buttons, watch chains, ear-rings, necklaces, seals, keys, faux Montres, and all such kind of toys’, with the latter phrase also picked out in a distinctive typeface. The lion and unicorn embossed on the factory and warehouse convey a modern British manufactory. (see Fig. 5.6) Such advertising was the result of engagement between the advertiser and the printer preparing engravings and copy. Some of these trade cards were one-offs, and expensive to produce. On occasion the name of the engraver was set into the design, as in Dunkerley & Cocking’s card. Beilby’s workshop, where Thomas Bewick did his apprenticeship, charged 15s. to engrave a copper plate for a trade card, and 1s. 6d. for a hundred prints from it. Yet it was also possible for a file-cutter, stove grate maker, or even nightsoil man to afford a trade card. Trade cards, like the goods and services they advertised, were no single conception and design, but often the work of anonymous jobbing engravers. Printers offered standardized formats that might be combined with other printed ornament and different typefaces; they offered models of text, an early version of modern computerized desk-top printing and publishing. Printers, not just producers and retailers, thus contributed to the ‘making’ of a commodity in a very real way. Their images spread the knowledge of the universe of consumption, and helped to create the contemporary ‘culture of consumption’. Complementing the trade card was another form of direct visual advertising. This was the pattern book and trade catalogue, a vital means of conveying realistic images of goods to distant consumers or to consumers ordering bespoke items. Fashion consumer goods were also advertised in illustrated trade catalogues. These derived from the ‘sample’ or ‘pattern books’ used extensively by silk, woollen, and cotton manufacturers, as well as other examples such as Matthew Boulton’s Soho Pattern Books of 1762, and Wedgwood’s Pattern Book. Equally important were the cabinetmakers’ design books, many of which were published. An outburst of pattern books from the 1730s accompanied the introduction of the new rococo style in furnishings and architectural ornament. The pattern books were part of a rapidly expanding print culture, and took advantage of the copyright act of 1735. Furniture was advertised, and fashion and good taste imparted in a range of famous catalogues provided by those such as Chippendale and ~ 277 ~

A Nation of Shoppers Sheraton.⁸² They sold, and indeed branded, their designs in such catalogues rather than pursuing the imitators. The threat of imitation generated by the sample and pattern books did not, however, stem the production in Britain from the 1760s of large numbers of catalogues displaying brassware, general metalwork, silver plate, and ornamental ironwork, glassware, and ceramics. Approximately 150 of these trade catalogues still survive, some in multiple editions, with the highest concentration from the Birmingham brass manufactures. Highly realistic illustrations printed from expensive copperplate engravings were accompanied by prices often written in by hand, or on a separate hand list; some were over 100 pages. The catalogues provide evidence of extensive selling by factors and agents, and in international markets. Many provided plates of commodity groups, sometimes a whole variety of metal objects including frames for looking glasses, urns, moulding, friezes, and decorative ornaments. Others demonstrated product complementaries with designs for plated ware and glass, or for silver and plated ware and ceramics, or brass furniture ware alongside rococo watch frames and stands. Series or collections of consumer goods were thus actively constructed by merchants, factors, and manufacturers in these trade catalogues.⁸³ Fashion and the consumer culture of early modern and especially eighteenth-century Europe were visual experiences. Shops, emporia, and warehouses were only one aspect of fashion marketing. The images of fashion goods in trade cards and catalogues even more dramatically provided the visual representation of discriminating taste, civility, and social status of modern fashion consumer goods. The trade cards and trade catalogues were, moreover, portable.They conveyed images of British consumer goods, their settings, and connections to an international market place. ⁸² See T. Chippendale, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director (London, 1754); T. Sheraton, The Cabinet Maker’s London Book of Prices (London, 1788); Sheraton, The Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book (London, 1793). See C. Edwards, Eighteenth-Century Furniture (Manchester, 1996), 171–94; Craske, ‘Plan and Control’, 209–10; M. Snodin, ‘English Rococo and its Continental Origins’, in C. Hind (ed.), The Rococo in England (London, 1984), 27–33. ⁸³ M. Berg and H. Clifford, ‘Commerce and the Commodity: Graphic Display and Selling New Consumer Goods in Eighteenth-Century England’, in M. North and D. Ormrod (eds.), Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800 (Aldershot, 1998), 187–200, pp. 197–9.

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8


Mercantile Theatres: British Commodities and American Consumers Nature, indeed, furnishes us with the bare necessaries of life, but traffic give us a great variety of what is useful, and at the same time, supplies us with everything that is convenient and ornamental. Joseph Addison, ‘The Royal Exchange’, in Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce

Shopping for fashionable new consumer goods in London, Bath, Birmingham, or even Kendal in the eighteenth century was about joining an international market place. Britain’s new goods were so successful because they made their mark on global as well as domestic markets. In Dublin and Edinburgh, in Philadelphia, Halifax, and Barbados, in smart Paris shops such as Au Petit Dunkerque, in Hanover and St Petersburg, and on the East India Company vessels plying their way between Madras, Macau, and Canton, British candlesticks, cutlery, teaware, ingenious and mechanical toys, and endless other newly invented products adorned tables and shelves of the modestly affluent or merely refined, or those aspiring to these.Their British brand was declared in local newspapers, trade catalogues, shipping orders and tradesmen’s accounts, and announced by shopkeepers and pedlars. British consumers in the eighteenth century knew they were buying global products; manufacturers saw to their international marketing as assiduously as they did to their home provisioning. This is what gave these goods their special cachet. Nowhere did shopping for the new British goods take off faster or spread ~ 279 ~

A Nation of Shoppers more deeply through the society than in the North American colonies. Consumers were part of an ‘Atlantic world’ where ‘Britishness’ was about the ‘constructed identities of island, nation and empire’, and extended to an ‘empire of goods’.¹ Just how extensive were those markets in the American colonies for certain British consumer goods; what made them so desirable to American consumers? What part did international markets, and especially the American market play in the branding of British new consumer goods?

Global Trade and Empire British new consumer goods moved to centre stage in leading and subsequently responding to the consumer cultures of the middling classes of the eighteenth century. Fostering fashions and seductive appeal, and building on distinction and the desire for taste, these new manufactured goods offered novelty, change, and the promise of inclusiveness. They were much more than material artefacts; they were part of an emerging consumer culture. This culture was national, but it was also international. A taste for exotic luxuries from the East crossed all of Europe’s borders in the seventeenth century, and continued to inspire consumer aspirations in the eighteenth century. French fashions pervaded Europe’s courts from the seventeenth century, and products and artisans spread with the travels of gentry, merchants, and religious groups as much as with print culture. But extensive urbanization and the distinctive growth of the middling groups in Britain provided the base for realizing the consumption of superfluous commodities. This market base together with new technologies provided the opportunities. Manufacturers, moreover, produced those commodities in frequently changing designs and patterns, and marketed these goods neither as unattainable luxuries, nor as necessary decencies, but as fashionable and desirable.They thus moved the manufactured artefact into the realm of fantasy and personal identity. In the process of attracting customers, manufacturers, retailers, and advertisers endowed consumer goods with national identities; these were not separate cultural identities, but ones centred on fashion and branding. The national or British commodity first joined, and then came to dominate international markets.The success of any consumer good thus depended on ¹ David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, The British Atlantic World 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, 2002); Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003); T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution (Oxford, 2004).

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Mercantile Theatres its ascendancy in international markets; its British identity spread a consumer culture connected to it, but its success at home also depended on that success abroad. Fashion demand was an international not a national attribute. Thus making new consumer goods was also about making markets abroad. This was achieved not by adapting to local customs, but by aggressively making British commodities fashionable, a form of branding with British national identity. Producers endowed particular sets of goods, especially ceramics, metal goods, and furniture with a British style, and this style was sold abroad. The British exported these wares virtually as a matter of course, and so insinuated the British brand into the consumer cultures of the American and Caribbean colonies. Many writers and commentators on public policy perceived luxury goods as French, oriental, or in some way foreign. The British luxury debates were to an important degree about responding to the impact of Asian and French imports. Part of that response, as we have seen, was to create new products, products that would not just be import substitutes, but become new export goods in their turn. These commodities displaced luxury with fashion; manufacturers and merchants branded them as British. Part of their national identity was a reaction against the ‘other’.They were not French; they were not associated with aristocratic ostentation. But they were new. This was not about emulation of one’s betters, but about the desire to experience anticipation of products and services not yet acquired. Indeed, in some cases these were products so newly invented they might well not be owned by anyone. Such pursuit of novelty could be developed so far with clothing, but the possibilities appeared endless with the inclusion of household furnishings and objects, ornamental ware, and the goods that provided the props of public and private sociability. Colin Campbell raised the question of ‘why Englishmen, either at home or in the colonies, developed the particular sets of attitudes toward household artefacts and their uses that gentility required, or accepted the dictates of ever-changing fashions in pursuing it’. Campbell argued that this is a question that needs much greater understanding than we currently have of how and why cultural change occurs.² He sought his answer to this question in a romantic hedonism of bohemian, dissenting, or radical groups, which initially combined idealistic values with the pleasure taken in exotic and strange objects, dress, and experiences. When the middling classes ² Cited in Lois Green Carr and Lorena S. Walsh, ‘Changing Lifestyles and Consumer Behavior in the Colonial Chesapeake’, in Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (eds.), Of Consuming Interests: The Styles of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va., 1994), 59–166, p. 145.

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A Nation of Shoppers imitated this behaviour or dress, it was the pleasure that attracted them, not the idealism.The enjoyment of the goods is partly the imagined associations and pleasures they will bring.³ To apply this theory to the eighteenth century, we can see manufacturers and retailers playing on anti-courtly values, enlightened democratic principles rather than despotism, and simplicity over artifice. In doing so they harnessed anti-luxury arguments to the promotion of British new consumer goods. Their success in making the new goods fashionable was indeed followed by an American luxury debate which espoused similar ideals, but failed at the time to provide the pleasurable goods to displace fashionable British ware. The Seven Years War (1756–63) intensified commercial antagonisms; tariff barriers rose in Europe, but colonial markets multiplied, extended by population transfers and demographic growth as well as by territorial acquisition. New markets in the Americas and the possibility of breaching Asian markets looked to be better prospects than breaking down European trade barriers. The mercantilism based in trade regulation shifted to new attention to colonial territories.The contribution of the colonies came to be given a more central part in claims about Britain’s prosperity; and greater concern given to Britain’s authority over them. The struggle with France transformed empire; at the end of the Seven Years War Britain had gained great territories in North America as well as additional parts of the West Indies, the West African coast, and areas in India around Madras and Calcutta. Against the background of over half a century of antagonism and warfare with France, and a major shift in Britain’s global ambitions and territories, what is really striking but so much less prominent in many of our historical accounts is the rise of a new place in world markets for British manufactured goods in the eighteenth century. Between 1688 and the 1780s the share of British GDP sold overseas doubled from 8 per cent to 16 per cent. Most of these goods were manufactured, and during major periods of industrial expansion between 1740 and 1760 and 1780 and 1801 more than half of the increase in production went abroad, and went for the most part to American, African, and Asian consumers.⁴ Why were people in different countries, often living at great distances from Britain, stimulated to desire ³ Campbell, ‘The Desire for the New’, 258. ⁴ P. K. O’Brien, ‘Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State and the Expansion of Empire, 1688–1815’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), 53–77, p. 54.

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Mercantile Theatres completely superfluous consumer goods, many of which had previously either not existed, or had not played a part in perceptions of the civilized way of life? While production and trade have been debated at length, and an aggressive mercantile state edifice has been added to pictures of Britain’s global might, there has been little said about the goods that were made and how their consumer markets were fostered abroad as well as at home. Many economic historians assume that explaining the supply of such goods, along with a state edifice that prevented the entry of the merchants of other nations into the system, is enough to explain consumer markets.⁵ But we also need to notice that these goods had become desirable, not just in Britain, but across the Caribbean and North American colonies, and indeed through parts of northern Europe as well. Where trade barriers arose, they merely whetted an appetite to be met if fitfully through smuggling. By the end of the Seven Years War a core group of new consumer goods had acquired a distinctive British identity, and their trade had Anglicized American consumer cultures.⁶ These consumer goods, though new, joined a long-standing trade in miscellaneous manufactured goods, many of them consumer products reaching back into the seventeenth century. Exports of a diverse range of manufactured goods accounted for most of London’s exports to the colonies in the 1690s. While clothing and textiles predominated in this trade, there had been a broadening and a diversification away from England’s traditional exports of wool and woollens. Exports included not just all manner of items of clothing, but window glass, furniture of all sorts, metal implements and ornaments, coaches, paper, clocks, nails, looking glasses, and a whole emporium of small conveniences and luxuries. Rapidly growing colonial markets for the diverse manufactured goods provided through London merchants fostered improvements in those industries, deepened their home markets down the social scale, contributed to the growth of London’s economy, and linked the emerging consumer cultures of Britain and her colonies.⁷ This trade, furthermore, was not based largely in one commodity, wool, as it had been earlier, and cotton as it was to become by the early nineteenth century, ⁵ For examples, C. Knick Harley, ‘Trade: Discovery, Mercantilism and Technology’, in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, i (Cambridge, 2004), 175–203; and Stanley L. Engerman and Patrick K. O’Brien, ‘The Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective’, ibid. 451–64. ⁶ Cary Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution in Colonial America: Why Demand?’, in Carson, Hoffman, and Albert (eds.), Of Consuming Interests, 483–697, p. 675. ⁷ Nuala Zahedieh, ‘London and the Colonial Consumer in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Economic History Review, 47 (1994), 239–61, p. 248.

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A Nation of Shoppers but in many consumer goods; such a multi-commodity trade helped to foster a transatlantic consumer culture, and indeed an international role for English goods. Thomas Malthus pointed to the importance of Britain’s trade in providing variety and novelty to the consumer, and the special care taken by consumers to make sure they got the superfluous goods they desired. The great mass of our imports consists of articles as to which there can be no kind of question about their comparative cheapness, as raised abroad or at home. If we could not import from foreign countries our silk, cotton and indigo, our tea, sugar, coffee and tobacco, our port, sherry, claret and champagne, our almonds, raisins, oranges and lemons, our various spices and our various drugs, with many other articles peculiar to foreign climates, it is quite certain we should not have them at all . . . And the trader or merchant, who would continue in his business in order to be able to drink and give his guests claret or champagne, might think the addition of homely commodities by no means worth the trouble of so much constant attention.⁸

The variety and choice offered by trade also became the trope for representing prosperity, civilization, and British goods. The patterns of Britain’s exports and imports show the significance of miscellaneous goods in her trade especially in the middle of the eighteenth century. While Britain’s imports of a wide range of manufactured goods from Europe declined over the eighteenth century, her own products and her exports of these to her American colonies displaced this trade. Imports of manufactures from Germany, Holland, Flanders, and France fell from £10,015,000 to £471,000 per annum during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, English industries developed behind high tariff barriers and prohibitions on French finery, and German and Dutch linens were displaced by Scottish and Irish products. Exports to the German states developed slowly to 1760, then rose steeply for a time, and subsequently abated until after 1790. Most trade with central Europe passed through the German ports, but there was no great advance in this until after 1785. Though exports increased to Spain, Portugal, and Italy up to 1760, after this they too ebbed away. England was not to persuade Scandinavia to take many of her manufactured goods, but had a little more success with Russia. Britain supplied a high proportion of the textiles and other goods re-exported through Spain and Portugal to their colonies in the Caribbean and South America. But it was markets in North America and the West Indies that held the key to the international development of British goods. Britain ⁸ Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, 461.

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Mercantile Theatres Table 8.1. Direction of England’s exports of manufactured goods, 1700–1773 (3year average, annual) Destination

1699–1701 (£000)

1752–4 (£000)

1772–4 (£000)

475

1,571

3,981

North America, British and foreign W. Indies, Spanish America, and W. Africa British islands (mainly Ireland) Re-exports of British goods from Spain and Portugal to their colonies Atlantic Europe Asia

86 637

215 1,172

499 1,003

1,198 2,264 111

2,958 2,754 638

5,483 2,314 690

Total

3,573

6,350

8,487

Source: Brinley Thomas, The Industrial Revolution and the Atlantic Economy (London, 1993), 37.

provided the lion’s share of a vigorous trade in basic clothing and provisions for slaves, servants, and labourers in these colonies, and for a dynamic trade in decencies, comforts, and luxuries for the middling classes and wealthy planters.⁹ The steady flow of consumer exports to the North American colonies up to 1740 became a torrent from mid-century. And that trade in the middle of the century was above all diverse: stationers, booksellers, mathematical instrument makers, watchmakers, jewellers, silversmiths, pewterers, coachmakers, grocers, haberdashers, milliners, lacemakers, all produced with an eye to their American and Caribbean customers. Warehouses for readymade shoes, saddles, and clothing were all well stocked for the American trade. American imports of haberdashery, upholstery, window glass, and apparel increased rapidly between 1739 and 1776. While North America and the West Indies took 11 per cent of English exports in 1700–1 and 16 per cent in 1750–1, this figure was 38 per cent in 1772–3 and 57 per cent in 1797–8. And these exports provided for markets at the top and bottom ends of the price range as well as the moderately priced. By 1770 at least half of England’s exports of ironware, copperware, earthenware, glassware, window glass, printed cotton and linen goods, silk goods, and flannels were sent to the ⁹ Ralph Davis, ‘English Foreign Trade 1700–1774’, in W. E. Minchinton (ed.), The Growth of English Overseas Trade (London, 1969), 99–120; Harley, ‘Trade’, 175–87; J. J. McCusker and R. R. Menard, The Economy of British North America 1607–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985).

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A Nation of Shoppers colonies. Fashionable, high-quality wares were most in demand.¹⁰ The American Revolution did not stem the flow of goods. British exports to North America more than doubled in value from £2,649,000 in 1772–3 to £5,700,000 in 1797–8.¹¹ In the case of hardware alone, North America provided 60 per cent of the market for British goods, and between the later eighteenth century and 1820 the biggest export markets for British ceramics shifted from Europe to America. By the 1790s English refined earthenwares made up most of the table, tea, and toilet wares used in the United States.¹² The Caribbean took one-third to one-half of English wares exported in the transatlantic trade during the eighteenth century.¹³ In 1700 exports of English manufactures valued at £202,481 were sent to the English plantations in the West Indies, while those sent to English plantations in North America were valued at £245,600. The consumption of white colonists in the West Indies was highly skewed to luxury products; the ratio of their consumption to that of colonists in New England was in the order of six to one. The great merchants and gentry ‘live here in the height of splendour in full ease and plenty’, ‘A cooper’s wife shall go forth in the best flowered silk and in the best silver and gold lace that England can afford’. The shops were stocked ‘with a vast array of merchandise’.¹⁴ Ralph Davis many years ago saw the connection between British industrialization and the breadth of demand in the colonial trade: ‘the process of industrialization in England from the second quarter of the eighteenth century [was] to an important extent a response to colonial demands for nails, axes, firearms, buckets, coaches, clocks, saddles, handkerchiefs, buttons, cordage and a thousand other things.’¹⁵ We can chart the expanding production of consumer goods and the geographical extension of their markets, especially in the Americas and the Caribbean, in the Ledgers of Imports and Exports. Economic historians have distilled the entries of these ledgers to derive large categories and their statistics on the contribution of trade to economic growth. But the representation recorded of the goods at the time ¹⁰ Jacob M. Price,‘The Imperial Economy 1700–1776’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii (Oxford, 1998), 78–104, p. 88; S. D. Smith, ‘The Market for Manufactures in the Thirteen Continental Colonies, 1698–1776’, Economic History Review, 51 (1998), 676–708, p. 695; Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1993), 90. ¹¹ Kenneth Morgan, ‘Business Networks in the British Export Trade to North America, 1750–1800’, in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (eds.), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, 2000), 36–64, p. 36. ¹² Weatherill, ‘The Growth of the Pottery Industry’, 28; Mille, Martin, and Dickinson, ‘Changing Consumption Patterns’, 222. ¹³ Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 93. ¹⁴ Zahedieh, ‘London and the Colonial Consumer’, 242, 252–3. ¹⁵ Davis, ‘English Foreign Trade’, 116.

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Mercantile Theatres Table 8.2. Selected exportsa from England and Wales to Europeb and North Americac (by value), 1740–1780

Furniture Glass, glassware, earthenware, china Small luxuriesd Metalwares Metals Prints, books, and pictures

Europe (£)

North America (£)

257,285 458,831 802,998 6,251,114 11,012,785 76,670

129,455 396,941 19,766 818,025 4,795,426 127,501

a

Not including re-exports in or out of time. Shillings and pence omitted. Including Turkey. c Not including Canada. North American colonies selected from the ledgers are: Carolina, New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia & Maryland, Georgia, New Providence, and Florida. d Small luxuries include clocks, clock cases, watches, toys for children, musical instruments, jewellery, small metal goods (toys) including compasses, mathematical instruments, coffee mills, musical figures, and spectacles. Source: Database: luxuries, metals, and metalwares in CUST3 ledgers, 1740–1780. (Maxine Berg, University of Warwick.) b

is lost in the process. The details of the ledgers are frequently bypassed by historians who complain that the ledgers do not use actual market prices, or that they omit items such as smuggled and Scottish goods until the 1750s.¹⁶ These records, however, even accounting for such omissions, provide testimony to the significance of the North American trade in luxuries and new consumer goods in the period between 1740 and 1780. The above (Table 8.2) breakdown provides for comparison of exports to Europe and the main colonies of North America of major goods classes in metals and metalwares, glass and earthenware, furniture, small luxuries, books, and pictures. The rich detail of the records revealing endless choice and variety are masked in large general categories for textiles or metals used by many historians of trade.These draw on Elizabeth Schumpeter’s British Overseas Trade Statistics. The accounts taken down by the customs records were sometimes placed in very broad categories, but in other cases finely detailed. Even within the records, the categories grew too large. Breen is fascinated by a category entitled ‘Goods Several Sorts’, ‘a catchall of small items, every year stretched to accommodate the forgotten baubles once the stuff of dreams’; its counterpoint was the New York City newspaper, which by the 1770s ¹⁶ See ‘Appendix: The Statistics of British Overseas Trade, 1784–1856’, in Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester, 1979), 77–127.

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A Nation of Shoppers listed over 9,000 different manufactured goods and elaborate descriptive categories.¹⁷ We can catch the fine detail of some of the British goods exported when we look in greater depth at some of these goods. A category I have constructed, ‘small luxuries’, covers clocks, clock cases, watches, toys for children, musical instruments, jewellery, and small metal goods or toys which included compasses, mathematical instruments, coffee mills, musical figures, and spectacles. The representation of the goods was one of choice and variety. The ledgers were not simple accounts to be culled for data on the macroeconomics of trade. They were part of a literary tradition connected to other texts from commercial dictionaries and manuals, to accounts of taxable wealth, mercantile digests and almanacs, and pamphlets and tracts of political economy.¹⁸ Their detailed listing of goods was, as we have seen in the case of these other texts, a way of conveying a world of consumption marked by endless varieties of material goods. The detail of the trade ledgers was replicated in the goods catalogues and the advertisements of the eighteenth century. One catalogue of Chelsea porcelain had 1,600 entries for 5,000–6,000 pieces; even small trade cards filled all available space with listings of individual commodities. Advertisements in the Pennsylvania Gazette, like those in English newspapers and the French ‘affiches’, listed dozens of commodities, or even varieties of any single good. The listing of goods, conveyed through commercial print and advertising, played its part in the making of a consumer consciousness. Choice conveyed by long lists of variable goods was no new invention, as we have seen, but an appropriation to British consumer goods of a key attribute long associated with luxury and traded goods brought from afar. The wonders of the East were displaced in the documents by the varieties of English woollens sent abroad and all the varieties of English commerce. In America the model was replicated. Shipping lists and advertisements were lists of goods from London; the varieties and clusters of consumer goods were British. The listings of goods conveyed a British consumer culture of plenty, variety, and choice. The actual export of these goods to the Americas certainly spread British economic power abroad, but the representation of these goods in lists, clusters, and categories contributed to a consciousness of the role of these British goods in personal and social values of respectability, civility, and ¹⁷ Tim Breen, ‘The Meanings of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Economy in the Eighteenth Century’, in Brewer and Porter (eds.), Consumption and the World of Foods, 249–60.Tim Breen, ‘ “Baubles of Britain”: The American and Consumer Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 119 (1988), 73–104, p. 80. ¹⁸ Rabuzzi, ‘Eighteenth-Century Commercial Mentalities’, 179–81.

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Mercantile Theatres gentility. American consumers perceived these British imports to offer alternatives, to introduce categories of comfort and taste into the lives of the American middling sorts.¹⁹ American consumers imported large numbers of British goods, in great variety, especially after the mid-eighteenth century. The Customs Accounts, as we have seen, attest to this. Inventories and archaeological sites are further testaments to the diversity of the predominantly British material culture that prevailed in all parts of the colonies. Newspaper advertising provided an ‘index of consumer choice’, but an index that was above all British.²⁰ The priority given to choice, variety, and listings of commodities was not an automatic given of British industrial prowess, but was itself a construction of mercantile trade, of empire, and of a particular phase of industrial development. For a relatively short but crucial period from the middle of the eighteenth century to its end, British industrial output was spread over a wide variety of goods which supplied home and colonial markets.²¹ Provisioning the capital goods and infrastructures of the New World was only one aspect of the rise of British trade. The rise of an international consumer culture was equally important as a stimulus to rapidly growing colonial markets.The goods meeting the demands for fashion and price competitiveness for the middling classes were produced most effectively in Britain. Manufacturers pursued invention, new products, division of labour and factory and workshop organization to provide the variety, choice, quality control, and prices demanded in these new consumer markets. There is a sense in which it is a non-sequitur that British goods were consumed in the American colonies. What else was there to consume, and just what part could domestically produced commodities in the colonies have played at this stage? British mercantile power imposed great restrictions on access to goods from elsewhere. The colonists, furthermore, were predominantly of English descent, and adopted a wider British material culture by force of habit, if not informed choice. Goldin, Sokoloff, and Khan have depicted the growth of an economy of small producers leading into a democracy of invention with wide-scale patenting activity in the early republic. According to their interpretation, artisans and the small-scale factory improved productivity through the division of labour and organizational change in mainly consumer goods production—hats, shoes, furniture, metal goods. But equally the scale of this production was limited, and with this the ¹⁹ Breen, The Marketplace, p. xvii. ²⁰ Ibid. 55–7. ²¹ Davis, ‘English Foreign Trade’, 108–9; Crafts, British Economic Growth, 20–3.

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A Nation of Shoppers capacity of ‘homespun’ to meet consumer needs and demands.²² Shammas, in her intensive work on probate records, initially of Massachusetts, and subsequently across the American colonies, found that even among farm families, at least a quarter of their expenditure during any given year went on goods brought from outside the region. For Breen this finding reinforces his scepticism on self-sufficiency, and underpins his claims for the dominant role played by the external market. Conceivably such goods might have come from countries outside Britain. East India Company merchants might have brought porcelain from China, or cottons from India directly to North American ports. Dutch, Spanish, and French ships might have brought their native delft, maiolica, and silks from Holland and Spain. German speaking immigrants to the Americas might have enjoyed linens and furniture from the ‘old country’. Fashionable Americans might have dealt directly with Holland, the southern Netherlands, and France for finished colonial goods, including lacquerware and printed fabrics, for ironware, small metal goods and glassware, and the full range of luxury goods from France. Such goods were not, however, widely imported from Europe, especially in the years leading to the American Revolution. An obvious reason was the Navigation Laws. The first laws, passed in 1651, were re-enacted and enforced by a Restoration parliament in 1660. These first acts were about imports into England; they dictated that all commodities imported into England be brought only in English ships. Commodities from the colonies could only be exported to England or to other English colonies. It was the act of 1663 that required that other European goods going to the colonies be exported via London, Bristol, or other English ports, and a system of duties and customs officers in the colonies structured access to international consumer goods. This opened opportunities for colonial merchants, previously hampered by the competition of the Dutch. It also created a ‘mercantilist vision’ of trade between the parts of one whole: the empire as a larger nation. It is clear that the Navigation Acts existed from the seventeenth century, yet claims to the Anglicization of American consumer culture focus on the period after 1740. By this time contemporaries conceived the Navigation Laws to be about privileged markets for British goods, and Adam Smith questioned the costs to the British consumer.²³ ²² Claudia Goldin and Kenneth Sokoloff, ‘Women, Children and Industrialization in the Early Republic: Evidence from the Manufacturing Censuses’, Journal of Economic History, 42 (1982), 741–74; Kenneth L. Sokoloff and B. Zorina Khan, ‘The Democratization of Invention during Early Industrialization: Evidence from the United States, 1790–1846’, Journal of Economic History, 50 (1990), 363–78. ²³ Cited in Breen, The Marketplace, 88.

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Mercantile Theatres

North American Consumers Who were these consumers who became so closely integrated into the expansion of a consumer culture 3,000 miles away? Over a million Europeans moved to mainland North America and the British West Indies between 1689 and 1815.These were not all English, and we must also focus on the timing of this emigration. Of 350,000 Europeans who emigrated between 1700 and 1790, one-third were Ulster Scots from Ireland and one-third were Germans. The highest levels of Irish and British migration did not take place until the later 1760s and 1770s; 69,000 settlers emigrated from Britain 1750–78, and another 140,000 from the end of the American War until 1815. In the 1770s half of all English emigrants came from London and its surroundings. After London, the main source for emigration was Yorkshire where most were independent householders from farming backgrounds, and these emigrated in family groups. Large numbers of Scots emigrated: these were merchants and storekeepers, attorneys, surgeons, teachers and ministers, driven to the New World not by necessity, but by ambition and opportunity.²⁴ These colonies were not, therefore, English outposts, though they may have been perceived as such by London merchants. The British components were, furthermore, refracted by large Scottish and Irish groups.²⁵ The population of the mainland colonies increased almost eightfold between 1700 and 1780, rising from 275,000 to 2,210,000.This population grew by nearly 40 per cent during the 1760s alone. A majority of this population was under age, yet standards of living improved, and imports of consumer goods turned rapidly upwards in the 1740s. A young population with a high dependency ratio also enjoyed a growth in its per capita income and wealth higher than in most of the rest of the world during the period between the first settlement of the colonies and the Revolution. Groups with middling wealth of £50 to £225 made up 30 to 45 per cent of the population of Maryland and Virginia, and their standards of consumption were rising with no sacrifice of capital. Benjamin Franklin, at the time, calculated a rate of population growth later declared by Malthus to be ‘without parallel in history’. This growth in numbers was not accompanied by the immiseration that ²⁴ James Horn, ‘British Diaspora: Emigration from Britain, 1680–1815’, in Marshall (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, ii. 28–52, pp. 41, 49–50. ²⁵ Brinley Thomas, ‘The First Atlantic Economy, 1700–1760’, in Brinley Thomas (ed.), The Industrial Revolution and the Atlantic Economy: Selected Essays (London, 1993), 34–59, p. 53; Lance Davis and Stanley Engerman, ‘The Economy of British North America: Miles Travelled, Miles Still to Go’, William and Mary Quarterly, 56 (1999), 9–22, p. 13; McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British North America.

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A Nation of Shoppers

Map 8.1. Eastern North America, 1690–1748 Source: Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. ii.

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Mercantile Theatres Table 8.3. City populations, North America and Britain North America

Boston New York Philadelphia Baltimore

1790

1800

18,320 33,131 44,096 13,503

24,937 60,515 61,559 26,514

Decennial Increase (%) 36.1 82.7 39.6 96.4

Britain, 4 largest cities 1750 London Bristol Norwich Newcastle

1800 675,000 50,000 36,000 29,000

London Manchester Liverpool Birmingham

959,000 89,999 83,000 74,000

Sources: Thomas M. Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), 342; E. A. Wrigley, ‘Urban Growth and Agricultural Change’, in E. A. Wrigley, People, Cities and Wealth (Oxford, 1987), 157–96, table 7.1, p. 160.

Malthus predicted, but by greater wealth.²⁶ And much of this disproportionate growth in income, Franklin believed, would be spent on British consumer goods: In Proportion to the Increase of the Colonies, a vast Demand is growing for British Manufactures, a glorious Market wholly in the Power of Britain, in which Foreigners cannot interfere, which will increase in a short Time even beyond her Power of supplying, tho’ her whole Trade should be to her Colonies.²⁷

This was also a population where big cities rapidly came to complement those in Britain. The populations of the four largest cities of the United States in 1790 and 1800 bear comparison in growth rates if not in size with Britain’s major commercial/mercantile cities. The number of town and city dwellers grew far more rapidly in Britain than in the rest of Europe. American cities, though obviously starting from a lower base, surpassed the British in their rates of growth. But the white inhabitants of these towns and their rural counterparts as yet had no parallel ²⁶ Carr and Walsh, ‘Changing Lifestyles’, 109–15. The passage from Franklin is cited in Breen, The Marketplace, 60–2. ²⁷ Cited in Breen, The Marketplace, 96.

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A Nation of Shoppers in Britain’s skilled industrial labour force. Those who had migrated from Europe did not use their industrial skills, but sought independence as small landowners and shopkeepers. Again Franklin had the measure of the thing: ‘no man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labour to subsist his family in plenty, is poor enough to be a manufacturer or work for a master. Hence while there is land enough in America for our people, there can never be manufactures to any amount or value.’ And when ‘brasiers, cuttlers, and pewterers’ came to the New World, they gradually dropped ‘the working part of their business, and imported their respective goods from England, whence they can have them cheaper and better . . . They continue their shops indeed, in the same way of dealing, but become sellers of brasiery, cutlery, pewter, hats etc. brought from England, instead of makers of those goods.’²⁸ What was it that prompted this North American population, certainly not all English emigrants, the majority not recent emigrants at all, to move into a high level of consumption of British imports especially from the 1720s? It was not the coercion and oppression later attributed to the Navigation Acts. It was choice, and choice increasingly associated with British identities.

British Identities Benedict Anderson gives the decisive historic role in the formation of national identities to the creole populations of North and South America. Print culture played a crucial part, especially in the newspaper and the trade gazette. The early American newspapers started as appendages of the market, trade gazettes with shipping news and commercial news; they were provincial, but they connected to the wider world, ‘refracting’ this into a world of vernacular readers. In the case of the Thirteen Colonies, the regions were geographically close, with market centres in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and all tightly linked by print and commerce.²⁹ They were also closely connected through merchants and shipping via these centres as well as Baltimore and Williamsburg to Britain. At an early stage they were ‘internally riven’ by religious division, yet bound together through the British goods they consumed and the print culture that told them about this.³⁰ By 1775 there were forty newspapers dispersed over all the colonies except for Vermont, and advertising provided their main source of revenue. ²⁸ Cited in Breen, The Marketplace, 67. ³⁰ Ibid. 202; Breen, ‘ “Baubles” ’, 75–6.

²⁹ Anderson, Imagined Communities, 60–5.

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Mercantile Theatres The most important of these was the Pennsylvania Gazette, serving the second largest city of the empire with its population of 40,000.³¹ The worldview of those newspapers which connected the colonies was not so very different than that of Britain’s commercial trading centres. Newspapers in Newcastle, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Bristol also projected a mercantilist world-view focused on trade and the accumulation of wealth. These British newspapers reported the progress of Britain’s global theatres of war, the movements of its merchant and slave ships, and long lists of their contents. Stocks and bullion values jostled with advertisements for luxury goods from all parts of the world. British newspapers of the 1740s and 1750s had sections on ‘American affairs’ or ‘British plantations’; periodicals published histories of individual colonies, and maps of these territories were avidly sought out by printers. There is a strong sense in which ‘the news’ ‘produced an “imagined community” of producers, distributors and consumers on both sides of the Atlantic who shared an avid interest in the fate of the “empire of goods” linking them together’.³² British merchants perceived late seventeenth-century American and Caribbean white settlers as another 250,000 Englishmen living in ‘detached suburbs’ across the Atlantic.The American colonists, for their part, up until the eve of the American Revolution saw themselves as Britons, keen to assert their full rights. They appealed to their common Protestant traditions and commitment to British liberty. British radicals and dissenters in turn defended the American colonists during the War of Independence as upholding higher values of English liberty. They denounced British government coercion of Protestant English people living in America, and they saw in the American colonists the patriotism, martial spirit, and moral fibre of ‘trueborn’ Englishmen who resisted illegal authority no matter where they lived.³³ British merchants, moreover, thought of a transatlantic whole, and even after the Revolution the Earl of Shelburne hoped for a special constitutional connection with the USA so that Americans could continue to have the status of Britons for commercial purposes.³⁴ Initially it appeared to be necessity and habit that drove consumer behaviour. The habitual, the unthought-out routines of everyday life, the internalized, inherited behaviours of public civility and private interaction led to ³¹ David Copeland, Debating the Issues in Colonial Newspapers (London, 2000), p. viii. ³² Wilson, The Island Race, 32–3, draws on Tim Breen, ‘An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America 1690–1776’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 333–57. ³³ Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People (Cambridge, 1998), 275–8. ³⁴ Breen, ‘ “Baubles” ’, 103. Stephen Conway, ‘From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 59 (2002), 65–100, pp. 65–7.

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A Nation of Shoppers the adoption of an English rather than Dutch or German heritage. Joshua Gee said of the West Indies in his Trade and Navigation of Great Britain Considered (1729) that ‘Our sugar plantations take from England all sorts of Clothing, both Linnen, Silks and Woollen, Wrought Iron, Brass, Copper; all Sorts of Household Furniture and a great part of their Food; so that they are entirely dependent on us.’ This assertion was reiterated for North America by Defoe’s comment the following year. ‘All those people must fetch from Great Britain only . . . all their house Furniture, Kitchen Furniture, Glass Ware, Upholstery.’³⁵ The Virginians had the habit of using British manufactures; they demanded them even during the revolutionary wars at the end of the century, and ‘Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Danes who traded with the Americans found that if they wanted to do business they had to vend British commodities.’³⁶ Habit was also reinforced by mercantilist trade policies. The Navigation Acts, for all their disadvantages, made for a large free trade area between Britain, the Americas, and the Caribbean. Easy imports were accompanied by accessible export markets, good credit, and naval protection. London, not Amsterdam nor Paris, provided an emporium for anything else that was desired.³⁷ But habit suggests continuity in trade and consumer demand, not the surge in demand for a wide variety of fashionable, superfluous consumer goods from the middle of the century. For the response of North American consumers to British goods was not just habitual; it was enthusiastic. And yet there is a lingering feeling even now that this ought not to have been so. The colonists were Puritans who became republicans; their lifestyles should have reflected this. While images of American homespun and vernacular styles have been effectively trounced by Tim Breen and other recent scholars, economic historians still look to colonial demand as dominated by chains and nails, cooking utensils, and anchors.³⁸ Puritan ideals are still deeply ingrained in representations of modest comforts rather than frivolous luxury. Bushman’s influential Refinement of America praises gentry houses with ‘no carpets or curtains, no upholstery and wooden floors and furniture’. Bright colours, he argues, were restrained in clothing, and middling groups wore few ornaments.³⁹ Views of simple ³⁵ Joshua Gee, The Trade of Great Britain Considered (London, 1729), 104; Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce, 361. ³⁶ David Macpherson and Adam Anderson, Annals of Commerce (London, 1805), iii. 591; Calvin Coulter, ‘The Import Trade of Colonial Virginia’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 2 (1945), 296–314, p. 304. ³⁷ McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British North America, 354. ³⁸ Breen, ‘Empire of Goods’, 481–5; Thomas, ‘The First Atlantic Economy’, 38. ³⁹ Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America (New York, 1993), 7, 24–5, 71.

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Mercantile Theatres uncorrupted lifestyles distinguished from the luxuries of Europe are still central to our vision of the American colonies. American consumers and their detractors at the time knew otherwise. They conducted their own American luxury debate. British consumer goods, seen at home as an antidote to Eastern luxury, in America became in turn the subject of a moral discourse.⁴⁰ The Boston Gazette warned: ‘Luxury makes her Appearance in a Manner so engaging, so easily she deceives us under the show of Politeness and Generosity, that we are not aware of Danger, till we feel the fatal Poison.’ The governor of Virginia in 1763 stated: ‘These imports daily increase . . . the common planters usually dressing themselves in the manufactures of Great Britain altogether.’ Some New England commentators feared the effects on the social order, declaring that ‘unbridled ambition was taken to be the social climber’s motive and high living its unearned reward’.⁴¹ In the wake of the Revolution Alexander Hamilton was dismayed by the American addiction to manufactured British imports, and hoped that government aid would sponsor independent American producers of such goods.⁴² But these efforts were not adequate to overcome what John Adams later feared to be the political ramifications of magnificence and splendour in a young democracy. ‘But what is all this to me? I receive but little Pleasure in beholding all these Things, because I cannot but consider them as Bagatelles, introduced by Time and Luxury in Exchange for the great Qualities and hardy manly Virtues of the human Heart. I cannot help suspecting that the more Elegance, the less Virtue in all Times and Countries.’⁴³ A luxury debate carried on at the level of political discourse and the newspaper editorial was also the subject of family correspondence of the merchants themselves. The young John Hatley Norton, running the Virginia branch of the London merchant house, was warned in 1772 by his aunt and another family member of creeping English luxury: ‘the Luxury that now Reigns in England is beyond example, and beyond Bounds . . . your Cousin Baylor is gone home full fraighted [sic] but not glutted with all these pastimes that are now in Vogue . . . in my Opinion, England has render’d him an unhappy Man.’ George F. Norton, a few months later, wrote: ‘I am sorry that Luxury (Virtue’s sworn Enemy) predominates too general from the ⁴⁰ For a full discussion of this luxury debate see Breen, The Marketplace, 172–92. ⁴¹ Cited in Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution’, 516, 520. ⁴² Doron Ben-Atar, ‘Alexander Hamilton’s Alternative: Technology Piracy and the Report on Manufactures’, William and Mary Quarterly, 52 (1995), 389–414, p. 393. ⁴³ Cited in Bushman, Refinement of America, 200.

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A Nation of Shoppers Peer to the Pedant, were you in England you would be astonished to see the Increase of Licentiousness since you left us; the Italian Fashions & Vices creep in upon us apace, which if not nipt in the Bud will take too deep a Root to be extirpated a few years hence.’⁴⁴ British consumer goods, as we have seen, acquired an international role over the course of the eighteenth century.This role was to some extent made in British industrial and political reactions to France, and manufacturers prioritized high-quality, high-design goods directed at middling-class consumers, endowing these with a distinctive British identity. But it was also the case that markets for these goods were developed rapidly in the Americas. Success there generated other European markets. Timing also counted; the rising prosperity of the white colonists and with this a demand for fashionable, high-quality wares coincided with Britain’s own ascendancy in the production of these goods. Even the opportunity to choose other goods, especially French fashions, during and after the Revolution was taken up only briefly. American consumers recognized their British imports to be amenities if not luxuries; they were by no means necessities.⁴⁵ Benjamin Franklin blamed taste as much as habit for colonial imports that rose per capita by 50 per cent between 1720 and 1770, for the colonies could afford imports ‘much the greatest part of which were superfluities . . . and mere articles of fashion’. Franklin was to claim in the mid-1750s that ‘Pennsylvania may save £3,280,000 in seven years, of which every farmer may, if he pleases have his share’ by giving up ‘superfluities, or at best conveniences’.⁴⁶ But desirable consumer goods had become indelibly stamped with Britishness. Advertisers and shopkeepers fostered their customers’ sensitivity to subtle changes in fashion and their insistence on the ‘latest’ English goods. Books sold better if they had an English rather than an American imprint. Even colonial groceries had a British imprint: rum from Barbados was preferred to that from Antigua or St Kitts; sugar from Barbados was preferred to that from Guadalupe. English products had become a habit.⁴⁷ These goods were portable—they started as dressing and cosmetics boxes and looking glasses, but soon included light furnishings, metal ornament, cutlery, table, tea, and glass ware, curtains, carpets, wallpapers, and other ⁴⁴ Frances Norton Mason, John Norton & Sons, Merchants of London and Virginia (Richmond, Va., 1937), 248, 278. ⁴⁵ Arthur L. Jensen, The Maritime Commerce of Colonial Philadelphia (Madison, Wis., 1963), 89. ⁴⁶ Benjamin Franklin, cited in McCusker and Menard, The Economy of British North America, 279; also cited in Smith, ‘The Market for Manufactures’, 677. ⁴⁷ Coulter, ‘The Import Trade’, 305.

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Mercantile Theatres house decoration. John Wayles, the father-in-law of Thomas Jefferson, commented in 1766, ‘In 1740, I don’t remember to have seen such a thing as a turkey carpet in the country except a small thing in a bedchamber. Now nothing are so common as Turkey or Wilton Carpets, the whole furniture of the Roomes Elegant & every appearance of opulence.’⁴⁸ Portable goods went with an international code of behaviour observed by the middling classes, whether in London, Kendal, Glasgow, Williamsburg, or Philadelphia or even in remote areas of the colonies. The goods went with ways of using them and served as a means of social integration even across oceans.⁴⁹ By the time of direct American trade with continental Europe from 1783 most consumer amenities and even luxuries consumed in the Americas were British, and their ways of consuming them Anglicized. European alternatives were no longer so superior in quality and design, and certainly by the end of the century, they could not compete on price. The production of those goods, the factory and mechanized processes that defined their advantage, and the marketing that made consumption cosmopolitan were honed on 3,000,000 American customers as well as home markets.⁵⁰ Colonial Americans had functioned within the British mercantile framework up to the Seven Years War, but it was Britain’s imposition of a series of taxes on specific goods in the aftermath of the war that caused much greater ambivalence over the products, and ultimately resistance in the form of consumer boycotts. The Sugar Act of 1764, the Stamp Act of 1765, and the Townshend Acts of 1767, placing duties on sugar, printed material, then tea, lead, paper, paint, and glass, provoked the series of non-importation agreements and wider consumer boycotts of British goods in 1765, 1768–70, and 1774–6. Wide public debate on the impact of British luxury was conducted in pamphlets and newspaper articles, especially in the Pennsylvania Gazette.⁵¹ While the non-importation agreements of 1768–9 achieved their desired effect in forcing Britain to repeal many of the taxes, there was no prospect that they would have any long-term effect in promoting import substitution in the colonies. Demand for British goods not only bounced back immediately after, but surged upward. Political debate on this consumerism harnessed a lot of the old chestnuts of the luxury debate, while it failed to take on the positive attributes of these luxury goods in their ⁴⁸ John Wayles to Farell & Jones, 30 Aug. 1766, cited in Jacob M. Price, Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade: The View from the Chesapeake, 1700–1776 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 18. ⁴⁹ Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution’, 579–604, 618. ⁵⁰ Davis, ‘English Foreign Trade’, 117. ⁵¹ For a discussion of the luxury debates in the Pennsylvania Gazette see Philippa Hubbard, ‘Transatlantic Clothing Cultures: Britain and her North American Colonies 1750–1800’ (MA dissertation, University of Warwick, 2003).

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A Nation of Shoppers

Fig. 8.1. Designs for escutcheons. Patterns for the export trade. M61G.129-1896. Trustees of the V&A Museum, Dept. of Prints and Drawings.

respectability, gentility, civility, convenience, and delight. Such debate, for all its appeal to republican virtue, was completely ineffective in directing consumer demand away from British luxury. How did these goods acquire a British ‘identity’? Was ‘identity’ an appropriate way to describe them? Listed in inventories, shipping lists, and advertisements they seem now but the dry dust of statistical analysis; but all the detail of these lists does evoke in us a sense of the wonder, fashion appeal, or belonging that contemporaries connected with these goods. We want to know what the goods meant and how people in the Americas felt when they incorporated these British things into their material worlds. Is it claiming too much to attach these goods to broader ‘identities’? Did people really feel psychological affinities to their goods, or were these goods simply outward markers of social position and reputation? Colin Kidd raises the point that ‘identity’ is a modern psychological and subjective concept possibly inappropriate to the objective allegiances and loyalties of early modern peoples. Did the people of the eighteenth century have a concept of ‘identity’, and if not, could they be said to hold identities?⁵² ⁵² Colin Kidd, British Identities before Nationalism (Cambridge, 2000); also see his recent critical revision ‘Identity before Identities: Ethnicity, Nationalism and the Historian’, in Julia Rudolph (ed.), History and Nation (Lewisburg, Pa., forthcoming 2005–6).

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Mercantile Theatres Certainly there was recognition of Britishness, even in the colonies. There was a standard acceptance of allegiance to a common monarch, common ‘blood’, Protestantism, and a commitment to British liberty. Non-British emigrants to the colonies, if Protestant, were easily assimilated to such Britishness.⁵³ Eighteenth-century commentators did agree that there were common behaviours or ‘manners’ to be found among peoples. These manners connected them. Hume argued that people with the same speech or language acquire a resemblance in their manners, and have a ‘common or national character, as well as a personal one, peculiar to each individual’. Kames referred to the ‘manners of the nation’. It was Hume’s view that the ‘same set of manners will follow a nation, and adhere to them over the whole globe, as well as the same laws and language’. Such manners might relate to the routines of everyday life, from the customs and rituals of serving at table or the practices of receiving visitors at home. Above all they were framed by recognizable material possessions deployed with taste and decorum.⁵⁴ Buyers were integrated with the familiar and the new in private social spaces and in rituals of periodicity and seasonality especially associated with eating and drinking. Travel outside spaces where individuals were known to each other affected the ways in which people communicated who they were. Mandeville recounted the confusion of the provincial traveller to London who could not decode the similarities in dress between gentlemen and rogues. He analysed the negotiations of merchants, also previously unknown to each other through hospitality, dining, the display of plate and dress, and the sharing of horses and equipages all with a gentle mien and finely cultivated conversation. But travel across countries and wholesale migration to North America demanded a reshaping of basic cultural norms. People made themselves known in strange places by adopting a means of social communication recognized far and wide. Manners became a principal letter of credit, and gentility was like paper money. The ‘politeness’ and ‘manners’ that derived from what Norbert Elias called the ‘civilizing process’ became an international code: In a world in motion, migrants and travellers needed a standardized system of social communications.They required a set of conventions they could carry with them that signified anywhere they went the status they enjoyed at home. From London and provincial England those polite conventions travelled with peoples and goods ⁵³ Conway, ‘From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners’, 70–6. ⁵⁴ Cited in Wilson, The Island Race, 12–14; Weatherill, ‘The Meaning of Consumer Behaviour’, 206–27; Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, 71.

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A Nation of Shoppers to the colonies. Standardized architectural spaces equipped with fashionable furnishing became universally recognized settings for social performances that were governed by internationally accepted rules of etiquette.⁵⁵

It is difficult to dislodge a faith in the cultural specificity and political connotations of interior decoration and dress. But already by the mid-eighteenth century housing and dress were about international fashions, and these were dominated by the British. Those architectural spaces from the mid-eighteenth century were ‘colour coded’. Household interiors from the 1740s were transformed by the new colours: carpets, wallpapers, curtains, and upholstered furnishings exploited the range of indigo and red dyes brought from the East in colour combinations and patterns that followed fashion as avidly as did clothing. Garish colours and elaborate patterns which prevailed for a time were no special statement of luxury’s ascendancy over virtue, but nothing more than a fashion statement. So too was the clothing that extended ‘identities’ through manners and gentility. The market in men’s clothing in the colonies and new republic from the 1770s reflected changing international styles, though these deployed a language of political virtue. The clothes were not homespun, but British imports, not just in their fabric, but in all their fashion details. They did not bear the marks of French luxury in the ‘grand habit’ of coloured and patterned silk, satin, or velvet waistcoats or coats.They took on the simple lines and sober plain fabrics of the English country gentleman; the English cloth riding coat led fashion. The style was perceived as egalitarian because of its simplicity, and associated with natural dignity and refined taste. It was British, but by the 1770s it had become an international style, adopted as much by other Europeans as by Americans. Simplicity of design and muted country colours were appropriate, to be sure, to the manly virtues promoted in the American luxury debates. But the key appeal of this dress was the quality of the fabric, and the detail of the extras and accessories, from gloves and stockings to buckles and buttons.⁵⁶ The focus on quality and detail so apparent in clothing also defined the appeal of newer British domestic and ornamental goods. Their American markets were made not on the cheapness of the goods, but on design and fashion, quality and detail, and it was British producers who provided these. Items of clothing most easily depict this effect. Diderot’s story of the disconcerting effect of acquiring a fashionable new banyan to replace his old dressing gown conveys these connections among commodities. Suddenly all ⁵⁵ Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution’, 549, 524. ⁵⁶ Hubbard, ‘Transatlantic Clothing Cultures’, 67.

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Mercantile Theatres his other clothing, and the furnishings of his study as well, appeared shabby and outmoded. Grant McCracken refers to acquiring a clothing ‘outfit’, a ‘repertoire of co-present’ elements. Colonial Americans bought their clothing from Britain to be ‘most fashionable’, ‘in the newest taste’, to be ‘in season’ and ‘to match’. So too did they purchase their furnishings and housewares. Inventory studies of settlers in the period before the second quarter of the eighteenth century indicate a high priority placed on a few comforts especially a good feather bed, and basic cooking pots, plates and bowls, a hunting gun, and some pieces of movable furniture such as chests. But by the 1760s middling households had a number of luxuries—matched china place settings, mahogany furniture, specialized drinking glasses and serving dishes, candlesticks, and tea and coffee services. Even those at the lowest levels of wealth had chairs and bedsteads, knives and forks, bed and table linen, teapots, and ceramic tableware.⁵⁷ By this time sons of the local gentry had been to Britain for education; merchants sent sons or younger relatives to establish commercial connections, and to work in the houses of other firms; thus frequent travel spread knowledge of metropolitan fashions and prices. Those on both sides of the Atlantic desired the new and the fashionable. And, as we have seen, the potential market was growing faster in the colonies. More prosperous emigrants who came in earlier decades from farms in the Home Counties and the south of England brought a taste for genteel customs with them. And even younger indentured servants by the mid-eighteenth century, and especially if from London or the south brought some acquaintance with decencies and luxuries with them.⁵⁸ Richard Bushman has written of an American refinement made on the transmission of a European court culture to the middle-class citizens of the early Republic.⁵⁹ But the gentility and civility he writes of was already a middling-class code of politeness along with the greater informality and sincerity of sensibility. But equally we know that shipping records and customs ledgers contained the full range of luxuries and consumer goods in all their available variety. Even at an early stage the wealthy displayed the best that Britain could offer. Thomas Addison of Maryland died in 1727 leaving a well-appointed house with pictures, mirrors in gilded frames, glass candelabra, ‘easy’ chairs, a backgammon table, tea tables, china tea sets, china dining plates and punch bowls, four dozen drinking glasses, a case of knives and forks, ⁵⁷ McCracken, Culture and Consumption, 118–20; Carr and Walsh, ‘Changing Lifestyles’, 63, 67; Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer, 184–5. ⁵⁸ Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution’, 545–6. ⁵⁹ Bushman, Refinement of America, pp. xi–xix.

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A Nation of Shoppers window curtains for every bedroom, and silk hangings for the best bed.⁶⁰ Merchants knew their survival depended on transmitting the most fashionable goods as quickly as possible to their customers. A visitor to Annapolis, Maryland, marvelled: The quick importation of fashions from the mother country is really astonishing. I am almost inclined to believe that a new fashion is adopted earlier by the polished and affluent American than by many opulent persons in the great metropolis [London] . . . In short, very little difference is, in reality, observable in the manners of the wealthy colonist and the wealthy Briton.⁶¹

The milliner Catherine Rathell started out in Frederickburg in the 1760s, but visited Williamsburg when the Assembly was sitting, and set up shop ‘as near Raleigh Tavern as she could find a place’. She advertised goods ‘well chosen’ for ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Just Imported from London’. In 1771 she moved to Williamsburg. She made frequent trips to London to select her stock herself, and where she did order through a merchant such as John Norton, she directed him to specific London dealers. Her orders were small, but included very diverse, top-quality, and high-fashion items. She was constantly anxious that the goods she ordered be sent immediately. She wrote to Norton in November 1771, ‘I must request of all things on Earth, you will by the very first Ship that Sails out of London Send me those Goods, or I shall at that time totally Loose [sic] the Sale of them, & have them on my hands for 12 Months longer . . . my greatest distress is for fear I should not have them in March’. She asked for ‘3 dozen sword canes from Mr. Masden in Fleet Street, 24 Spring Brass Candlesticks and 2 dozen pair of very Neat best Doe or Buck Skin Gloves’. The following year she wanted paste shoe buckles, gilt shoe buckles, and plated carved shoe buckles, all ordered in 8 to 18 pairs, as well as numbers of plated candlesticks, silver sauce spoons, and plated soup ladles. She later ordered silk stockings, fine shoes, kid gloves, wedding fans, tutenag and plated snuffers, and snuff dishes.⁶² Rathell’s anxieties over delivery dates are indicative not only of a market for her luxury wares, but high competition and fashion selling, where timing was all. Her example leads us to the kinds of articles that led the upsurge in consumer demand from the 1740s. These were fashion articles, frequently connected with each other.They were not just articles of clothing and ornament ⁶⁰ Carr and Walsh, ‘Changing Lifestyles’, 65. ⁶¹ William Eddis, Letters from America Historical and Descriptive . . . from 1769–1777 (London, 1792), cited in Breen, ‘ “Baubles” ’, 85. ⁶² Mason, John Norton & Sons, 518, 206, 211.

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Mercantile Theatres such as gloves, shoe buckles, and buttons; they were also articles associated with social rituals such as tea and dining ware, as well as portable room decoration such as light furnishings, mirrors, and lighting. These articles were not just added to households as they became more available or affordable; they were purchased ahead of other basic equipment of comfort and cleanliness. This was especially the case with dining, drinking, and tea ware. These were owned at all social levels, even by 20–25 per cent of poorer households by the 1740s and 1750s.⁶³ These goods came in all varieties, and might be had in the most basic materials to the most luxurious, in the most mundane to the most fashionable designs. Even in modest households distinctions were made between bestware and everyday, and the entertainment of visitors followed transatlantic and cross-cultural conventions. Just as in Britain, dining was a social event even within the family, with conventions and customs absorbed subconsciously, but meticulously followed. The serving of food, the layout of utensils, and ways of eating provided a convivial centre to family life and atmosphere was important. And the full paraphernalia of British glassware, china dinner services, and cutlery provided the props to these conventions. Tea drinking, the novel social ritual of Europe’s elites early in the eighteenth century, was an expected part of British middling-class behaviour by the later decades of the century. It spread rapidly in the Americas; the dominant British diaspora also settled the ritual on non-British European immigrants. Tea drinking like other consumer behaviour had become a shared American experience. ‘British manufactured goods and fashions served additionally to induce many ethnic peoples to accommodate themselves willingly or unwillingly to the dominant English culture.’ Breen cites the example of tea drinking ‘in the most remote cabins’ of the Swedish settlements of Delaware by midcentury.⁶⁴ This experience was to be repeated in many other British colonies, former British colonies, and parts of the British Empire. Though the European settler communities in these territories might be multicultural and multi-ethnic, the dominant material culture and many of the rituals that went with this were British. Across the English, Scots, and Irish communities of the American colonies, and the German, Dutch, Swiss, and Swedish communities as well, new consumer goods entered from Britain not as single items, but in groups that related together. Teacups demanded teapots or equipages, silver ⁶³ Carr and Walsh, ‘Changing Lifestyles’, 117, 131–3; Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution’, 618; Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer, 185. ⁶⁴ Carson, ‘The Consumer Revolution’, 665; Breen, ‘ “Baubles” ’, 83.

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A Nation of Shoppers spoons, and slop bowls and perhaps even a tea table. New fine earthenware dining plates also needed silver plated candlesticks, fine cutlery, a range of drinking glasses, and damask napkins. The appearance of one novelty item such as a porcelain china cup could have this all-out unsettling impact on earlier habits of dining and drinking. One object from outside customary practices, could subsequently bring several with it, and entail a whole change in practices. The ‘Diderot effect’ was about product connections, and was the means by which an identifiable style, even national cultural practices might be easily interjected into remote or even distinctive national environments.⁶⁵ Colonial Americans bought their ornamental and domestic goods, and not just clothing, in sets; every article needed to ‘fit’ with other consumer items. Buying these goods, displaying, and using them in private spaces gave North Americans the opportunity to develop their own civility and friendship, and places of free conversation and relaxed social encounter.⁶⁶

The Goods Buttons and buckles filled a place in Western dress cultures as necessity, decency, and luxury. They were produced in all types of materials, but most sought out in fashionable steel or other new metals and the buttons stamped in decorative motifs. English buckles and buttons dominated markets in Europe and the Americas. Silver buckles were markers of rank, and buttons provided fashionable but discreet ornamentation for men and women alike. American storekeepers stocked buttons by the thousands. American merchants ordered them in all possible varieties, including fashionable varieties for children. Robert Nicholas from Virginia in 1768 ordered twelve pairs of children’s pinchbeck shoe buckles, six pairs of knee buckles, four of these for large boys, in an order otherwise made up of fabrics and women’s fashionable shoes. In 1773 he wanted five gross of large and cheapest metal coat buttons, and a gross of flat metal waistcoat buttons of a better sort. Peter Lyons, also in Virginia, in 1771 ordered two pairs of fashionable silver shoe and knee buckles for boys aged 12 and a pair of fashionable silver shoe buckles for a girl of 7. Mann Page in 1770 ordered twelve dozen brass coat buttons, twelve ⁶⁵ McCracken, Culture and Consumption, 118–29, pp. 119, 124. ⁶⁶ See David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), discussed in Eliga H. Gould, ‘An Empire of Manners: The Refinement of British America in Atlantic Perspective’, Journal of British Studies, 39 (2000), 114–22, p. 118.

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Mercantile Theatres dozen great coat buttons with mohair, and 24 yards of duffle with buttons and mohair for servants’ coats.⁶⁷ British buckles and buttons were key to fine and fashionable styling. The French aspired to manufacture these, and to develop the trends that made them carriers of fashion, but they failed in face of British competition. The American consumers could not get enough of them. Their newspapers advertised, and their merchants ordered ‘newest fashion buckles’, ‘knee and stock buckles with gold edges’, ‘scarf buttons’, ‘breast buttons’, breast white metal buttons, glass buttons, or ‘flat metal waistcoat buttons of a better sort’, brass coat buttons, or great coat buttons with mohair.⁶⁸ Tableware, especially cutlery and dishes, were just as quickly incorporated into American possessions. Cutlery sets appeared on American tables from the 1690s; and ceramic flatwares even earlier from the 1670s. The wealthier half of households in New England, Annapolis, and Williamsburg used knives and forks and ceramic dishes by the 1720s. Those in the Chesapeake followed in the 1730s. By the 1750s throughout the colonies about 50 per cent of middle-wealth groups owned these items, and 20 to 25 per cent of those in the lower wealth categories.⁶⁹ Retailers and buyers just assumed that the cutlery came from Birmingham and Sheffield. The goods were closely identified with place. Even the Scottish ships and merchants supplying the Virginia trade in the mid-eighteenth century were well stocked with Birmingham and Sheffield cutlery, Bristol glass, Staffordshire earthenware, Kendal cottons, Yorkshire kerseys, and Irish linens.⁷⁰ Fine cutlery for use at table was frequently signified by an ivory handle, and came properly boxed in its dozens. John Norton received an order from Martha Jacquelin in 1769 for two dozen ivory handle knives and forks priced at 26 shillings a dozen. Mann Page, the next year, ordered a dozen ivory handle knives and forks, as well as a dozen dessert knives and forks in boxes with his teacups and glasses. William Reynolds wanted a dozen ivory handle table knives and a dozen dessert knives and forks in a mahogany case with room for a dozen spoons and a carving knife and fork.⁷¹ ⁶⁷ Bushman, Refinement of America, 71; Mason, John Norton & Sons, 72, 125. ⁶⁸ For examples of advertisements see Hubbard, ‘Transatlantic Clothing Cultures’, 51, 67. For cases from merchants, see Letter from Daniel Flexney to John Reynell, 9 Feb. 1737, Reynell Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Invoice of Devonshire Rees & Loyd for Jones & Wister, Birmingham, 13 Aug. 1761, Jones & Wister Letterbook, Owen Jones Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; The National Archives (London), Chancery Masters Exhibits, C112/61 William and George Panter, Sale by Auction, 12 July 1780—Goods for Export; Order from Mann Page to Norton & Son, 15 Feb. 1770, cited in Mason, John Norton & Sons, 125. ⁶⁹ Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer, 185. ⁷⁰ Coulter, ‘The Import Trade’, 298. ⁷¹ Mason, John Norton & Sons, 103, 125, 188.

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A Nation of Shoppers Table 8.4. Exports of glass ware and earthenware from England and Wales to Europe and North America (by value), by decade, 1741–1780*

1741–50 1751–60 1761–70 1771–80 single year 1800d

Europea (£)

North Americab (£)

Totalc (£) (Schumpeter)

46,547 26,036 20,597 63,570 18,213

20,894 23,075 28,210 29,965 24,787

67,441 86,323 124,304 178,530 75,703

* Excludes bottles, window and plate glass, tiles and stone pots. a Results from database, exports only, not re-exports in or out of time. b Results from database, exports only, not re-exports in or out of time. c Total value of glass and earthenware exported from England and Wales to all destinations. Figures from Schumpeter except for 1741-50, where database figure (£67,441) was slightly higher than Schumpeter figure (£66,606). d Figures from Schumpeter, table XXIV. Shows expansion in North American market. Notes: Figures are for exports only, not re-exports in or out of time. Figures omit shillings and pence and hence are a slight underestimate of values. Sources: (1) Database: luxuries, metals, and metalwares in CUST3 ledgers, 1740–1780. (Maxine Berg, University of Warwick.) (2) Elisabeth Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade Statistics 1697‒1808, table XXIV.

The major export markets for Britain’s rapidly growing ceramics manufacture shifted from Europe to the Americas between the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is difficult to identify the timing of this shift in the accounts left by the customs officers, for they recorded glassware and earthenware together. While exports of glass and earthenware to western Europe over the period 1741–60 to 1761–80 only increased slightly from £90,036 to £116,419, they doubled for southern Europe and Turkey, from just over £40,000 to just over £85,000, and tripled for northern and eastern Europe from over £30,000 to over £90,000. But the American markets were bigger than any of these, with exports rising from £127,828 to £265,627 over the whole period. The American market for British ceramics during the mid to later eighteenth century, on first impressions, seemed to be relatively limited. Early imported serving dishes and plates came from Germany, Holland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal; these were delftware or they were Chinese ware re-exported from Holland and Britain. Along with these, merchants brought in a variety of English earthenwares from Staffordshire and Liverpool. Plates identified by merchants as Queen’s ware were popular. By the 1780s English creamware, then pearlware displaced all other types of ceramics, and by the 1790s English refined earthenware made up the majority of ~ 308 ~

Mercantile Theatres table, tea, and toilet wares in the USA.The goods were frequently advertised as English, as in the ‘Sundry sorts of fine and coarse English earthenware’ advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette in November 1754, or the ‘English Stone and Delf Earthen Ware’ advertised in the same newspaper in November 1760.⁷² The rapidity of the American uptake of new British earthenware was remarkable. Though the American market consumed cheaper standardized Staffordshire ware and the products of the Liverpool potteries before the 1770s, it was not until after 1770 that creamware appeared commonly in American retail stores. This creamware was undecorated, and competed with Chinese porcelain in prestige; and Wedgwood creamware was the quality import. But soon to overtake even creamware was pearlware, produced both by Wedgwood from 1779, and as a China glaze product by other Staffordshire potters. This was decorated, and was a new fashion product aping the earlier taste for Chinese painted porcelain; it was especially honed to more expensive teaware.⁷³ This rapid domination of American markets by British ceramics coincided with a sharp upturn in the total exports of British ceramics: these exports doubled between 1785 and 1800, at a time when the British industry grew by about three-fifths.⁷⁴ The Philadelphia market was already buoyant by the 1770s. John Norton filled an order for Peter Lyons in 1771 for ‘a complete set of table china’: this included 26 separately described bowls and dishes of various sizes; 6 dozen china plates, 2 dozen deep china plates; 2 china butter boats and 2 butter plates. The order included wine glasses, and pieces of table glass for pickles and salt cellars.⁷⁵ The Pennsylvania Evening Post in 1776 carried an advertisement for Egyptian, Etruscan, embossed red china, agate, green, black, cauliflower, white, blue and white, stone enamelled, striped, fluted, pierced, and plain Queen’s ware teapots. By 1774 more than 100 English manufacturers were supplying creamware to domestic and foreign markets, and most ships entering Philadelphia by the early 1780s were carrying Staffordshire ware.⁷⁶ Consumers bought teaware separately from tableware; they bought it in more expensive ranges, and it was decorated, either porcelain or pearlware. It was also commonly bought in sets of six cups and saucers. Teaware was predominantly either Chinese porcelain, or from the later years of the ⁷² Pennsylvania Gazette: On Line Version, Accessible Archives, Nov. 1754 and Nov. 1760. ⁷³ Miller, Martin, and Dickinson, ‘Changing Consumption Patterns’, 228–31. ⁷⁴ Ibid. 222; Weatherill, ‘The Growth of the Pottery Industry’, 27. ⁷⁵ Mason, John Norton & Sons, 190–1. ⁷⁶ Mary M. Gilruth, ‘The Importation of English Earthenware into Philadelphia 1770–1800’ (MA thesis, Winterthur, n.d.), 31–4.

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A Nation of Shoppers century, English porcelain or pearlware. These too went with orders for other tea accessories. William Reynolds ordered from Norton not just tea china, but a dozen ‘revers’d handle’ teaspoons, a pair of sugar tongs, a cream bucket and ladle and a ‘neat Mahogany Tea Chest and Canisters’.⁷⁷ Orders for teawares frequently included glassware. George Wythe complained to Norton in 1768 that his order had never appeared. This was an order for a particularly special event: ‘an elegant set of table and tea china, with bowls of the same of different sizes, decanters and drinking glasses, an handsome service of glass for a dessert, four middle sized and six lesser dishes and three dozen plates of hard metal, 100 skins of writing parchment proper for enrolling our acts of assembly on’. Along with this he requested ‘a bonnet for Mrs. Wythe’. Mann Page in 1770 ordered a dozen teacups, saucers, a dozen coffee cups and saucers, and a slop bowl of Queen China together with 4 decanters, 2 dozen wine glasses, 6 beer glasses, 8 cut glasses for pickles, a dozen sweet meat glasses, and 2 blue and white china bowls.⁷⁸ Middling-class buyers in the 1780s and 1790s spent disproportionately on their teaware and better dinner ware. At the top end of the market was oriental porcelain; George Washington’s dinner set of Nankeen blue and white cost £37 16s. for 193 pieces at the end of the Revolution; painted or enamelled sets cost £56 to £75. A common dinner set of 172 pieces of ‘ordinary blue and white’ cost £8 5s. To put these figures in context, in rural Massachusetts in the 1790s the cost of keeping a house, horse, and reasonably handsome lifestyle was £60 a year. A medium-sized dinner set of plain creamware might be had for £3 to £5, also the price of a cow, while that of a horse was £10 to £20. Individual creamware teacups and saucers might be had for as little as 1¹/2d. to 2d. each, so that those with very modest means might buy some teaware, but it was a set that was cherished. An expenditure of £5 to £15 for a creamware tea set and dining ware was certainly a luxury for the less affluent; it was a prized possession for those with estates from £200 to £700. Purchasers generally chose simpler types of mainly utilitarian tableware, undecorated or bordered in blue or green, and this was bought by all classes in Philadelphia. Even those of modest incomes had some creamware, or agate, stoneware, or basalt ware in their homes.⁷⁹ Orders for general hardware and fabrics included candlesticks of brass; those for silverware and luxury clothing generally included silver candlesticks. James Carter in 1771 asked for four large fashionable brass candlesticks along with his order for hardware, fabric, and seed. It was Catherine ⁷⁷ Mason, John Norton & Sons, 58. ⁷⁸ Ibid. 58, 125. ⁷⁹ Gilruth, ‘The Importation of English Earthenware’, 64–73.

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Mercantile Theatres

Fig. 8.2. Samuels Family, New England, 1788. Johannes Eckstein. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass.

Rathell who ordered plated candlesticks along with silver sauce spoons and ladles as well as silk stockings and kid gloves.⁸⁰ Candlesticks were a rather specialized fashion in the earlier eighteenth-century colonies, though if they were of brass and iron they were not so very expensive at about 16s. a pair. Only about a quarter of households with less than £400 in early eighteenth-century Pennsylvania had candlesticks, while only two-fifths of those with more than this owned them. By the 1770s three-quarters of inventoried households in the colonies had candlesticks; in northern commercial cities like Boston this rose to 90 per cent. It was not just wealth that determined the use of candles and the market for British candlesticks; it was also differences in urban and rural cultures, attitudes to evening leisure, and associations between candlelight and special festivity.⁸¹ Furniture would seem the most unlikely English import in colonies dis⁸⁰ Ibid. 152, 211.

⁸¹ John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort (Baltimore, 2001), 136–9.

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A Nation of Shoppers Table 8.5. Exports of selected furniture from England and Wales to Europe and North America (by value), 1740–1780

Cabinet ware Upholstery Beds Chairs

Europe (£)

North America (£)

Totala (£)

116,611 137,371 424 2,259

10,878 113,717 3,679 1,102

127,489 251,088 4,103 3,361

a

Total of exports to Europe and North America. Notes: Figures are for exports only, not re-exports in or out of time. Figures omit shillings and pence and hence are a slight underestimate of values. Source: Database: luxuries, metals, and metalwares in CUST3 ledgers, 1740–1780. (Maxine Berg, University of Warwick.)

tinguished by their natural endowments in wood, and the wood-working skills quickly developed by their immigrants. But like homespun, simple rough-hewn furniture was bypassed where possible for furniture brought from London. London also dominated colonial imports of glass, mirrors, and upholstery. English furniture styles spread with teaware and tableware. Lacquered tea tables, first supplied by the Dutch from the East Indies trade, were soon displaced by English japanned ware and English mahogany tea tables, chests, and chairs. Colonial buyers associated English furniture with gentility and civility. The Massachusetts Gazette in 1772 advertised for ‘a genteel set of Mahogany chamber Chairs, with carv’d Knees and claw feet (English made) or any other very neat good furniture’. Lord Sheffield in his review of Anglo-American trade before the Revolution wrote of ‘Articles in which there will scarce be any competition . . . Upholstery in many articles, is too bulky; but all that goes from Europe will be taken from England . . . Except the looking glasses made in Holland there is no article of glass in any part of Europe but the British, which will answer in the American market.’ And William Bingham’s house in Philadelphia in 1794 was described as being in the ‘best English taste, with elegant and even superb furniture.The chairs of the drawing room were from Seddon’s in London, of the newest taste; the back in the form of a lyre, with festoons of crimson and yellow silk . . . The carpet one of Moore’s most expensive patterns.’⁸² The taste for English furniture was further fostered by the close interaction between furniture makers in London and brassware and cabinetware ⁸² All cited in Edward T. Joy, ‘Some Aspects of the London Furniture Industry in the Eighteenth Century’ (thesis, University of London, 1955), 132, 136, 138.

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Mercantile Theatres makers in Birmingham. Expensively illustrated catalogues of brass furniture fittings from escutcheons to door knobs spread English design styles and fostered demands for English furniture. The highest furniture exports to America were upholstery and looking glasses. These reflected increasing demands for comfort and fashion. Even in the early 1770s when trade was affected by conflicts between Britain and the colonies, the furniture trade was substantial, and especially that of upholstery. New York imported furniture valued at £2,415 (of which £2,290 was from London, and mainly upholstery), Pennsylvania £1,085 (with £860 from London), and Virginia and Maryland £2,966 9s. (with £1,330 from London).⁸³ English upholsteries, bed hangings, and window curtains were furthermore woven and printed in English floral designs. By the 1770s these were made on the latest spinning and cylinder printing machinery used first in Britain. The fabric designs transformed Indian and Chinese landscapes into recognizable English floral designs. As Beverly Lemire has argued, ‘Britishness was by this time stylistically defined by fabrics and motifs of Asian origin that had been absorbed into the patterns of daily life’. Conveying privacy and intimate relaxation, they became part of the informality and comfort that was associated with respectable gentility.⁸⁴ Upholstery, above all furnishings, became particularly entrenched in the transatlantic export trade. The English also cornered the market in fine looking glasses. To be sure, German producers provided the cheaper ‘pennyware’ looking glasses, either re-exported from England or sent via the legitimate trade allowed under the Navigation Laws from Madeira or Tenerife.⁸⁵ During the Revolutionary Wars they could be sent via Hamburg. But for the most part looking glasses were also associated with Britain. In the period 1675–1725 about three-quarters of London’s propertied households had looking glasses. One-half of those in provincial and lesser towns had them. Most of these mirrors were produced in London’s twenty-four glasshouses. From the 1720s on they were produced for the home and foreign trade in centres in Bristol, the midlands, and the north-east. They spread as quickly in the American colonies, with more urban areas possessing the highest numbers. In Essex County, Massachusetts, 35 per cent of inventoried households had looking glasses in 1700, but in Salem, 75 per cent of households had them. Half of those with inventories in urban Pennsylvania between 1705 and 1735 ⁸³ E. T. Joy, ‘The Overseas Trade in Furniture in the 18th Century’, Furniture History, 1 (1965), 1–11; also E. T. Joy, ‘English Furniture Exports to America 1697–1830’, Antiques (1964), 92–8, p. 95. ⁸⁴ Beverly Lemire, ‘Domesticating the Exotic: Floral Culture and the East India Calico Trade with England, 1600–1800’, Textile, 1 (2003), 65–85, p. 80. ⁸⁵ Crowley, The Invention of Comfort, 129.

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A Nation of Shoppers had mirrors compared with less than a quarter of those in south-eastern Pennsylvania. During the early eighteenth century larger looking glasses became a piece of furniture for display. These were set in frames or in panelling or woodcarving, and cost £2 to £5 in comparison with the 2s. to 5s. spent on simple looking glasses.⁸⁶

Mercantile Practice: The Trade in New Consumer Goods The trade in new consumer goods was fraught with risk. Though markets for luxuries and fashionable amenities in the American colonies and the Caribbean appeared to British producers to be easily their best opportunities, the results rarely measured up to expectations. Some English producers regarded the colonies as their best outlet for low-quality, outmoded stock. Merchants in Virginia complained of ‘defective goods’ or ‘goods damaged in transit’. They were suspicious of London shopkeepers and tradesmen who when they knew goods were wanted for export, would impose ‘sometimes very slight and indifferent Goods upon Us’.⁸⁷ Gerard Beekman, a New York merchant trading mainly in indigo, imported virtually nothing from England in the 1740s after a bad experience where he was sent unsaleable ‘old shop goods’ in 1746, and in 1749 he found two-thirds of his original imports still unsold.⁸⁸ Even Wedgwood, as we have seen, regarded the American market as a dumping ground for his outdated stock, and did not seriously pursue marketing possibilities there until the 1770s. But American merchants and shopkeepers were alert to this strategy. They carefully identified English producers, dealers, and retailers they knew they could do business with; they were fastidious in their specifications of quality, design, and fashion, and they were very demanding on the timing of deliveries. Seasonality was all. Goods had to be delivered to meet spring and autumn fashion demands; if they were delayed this meant stocks would be left until the following year, and they would be quickly outdated. Spring was said to be the best time for ironmongery, cutlery, furniture for houses, and other brass and iron work. Spring goods were usually bought between November and January; they could be expected to reach Maryland in February or March. Autumn goods were shipped in June or July in order to reach Maryland by early September. It was vital that these goods arrive by ⁸⁶ M. E. Hayward, ‘The Elliots of Philadelphia and the Looking Glass Trade 1755–1810’, MA thesis, University of Delaware (1971), 161–4. ⁸⁷ Coulter, ‘The Import Trade’, 303. ⁸⁸ Philip L. White, The Beekmans of New York in Politics and Commerce 1647–1847 (New York, 1956), 289.

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Mercantile Theatres the opening of the season; or ‘they had better not come at all’. Merchants claimed Philadelphia purchasers to be ‘more nice’ in their selection than English consumers—they wanted only the latest fashions in styles, colours, and trimmings, and there were many complaints of a flooding of the dry goods and other consumer goods trades. Markets were highly competitive, and shopkeepers had a good choice of merchants’ stores to visit, seeking their bargains. But it was the shoppers who wielded ultimate power. A Maryland factor in 1749 sought British imports ‘suited to the situation of the Store and Fancy of the Customers . . . [the customers behaved] in a whimsical and unpredictable way’.⁸⁹ We have seen how particular merchants and retailers were over their orders of high fashion and luxury goods. But ordering of even more ordinary consumer goods was highly specific, and merchants were under great pressure to fulfil these precise demands. John Reynell, a Philadelphia merchant, received letters from one of his London suppliers in the 1730s on the difficulties of meeting specific orders. ‘The buttons are of the sort you wrote for but less price. I could not buy so few at that price, and have therefore sent the more in the general cargo.’ He was also in such a hurry to get his shipment off that the earthenware ‘is not exactly according to the invoices’.There were mismatches of three pint bowls and quarts, and ‘if there are too many I may take them back’. This supplier responded to complaints about the cotton fabrics he sent, pointing out that he had done his best to get good prices; to make amends he sent 100 half-faggotts more of steel and 100 bags of buttons.⁹⁰ Uncertainty plagued markets in sundry small luxury and consumer goods as well as fabrics and hardware. John Reynell observed that the market was overstocked in 1736; his cousin trading with him from England wrote: ‘I have taken what care I can to send such goods as might best answer, notwithstanding which I have met with more difficulties on account of unsaleable goods either by error in colour or quality than I have met with in all the other trade which I carry on . . . I know no other remedy than to do less till your markets give greater encouragement.’⁹¹ British suppliers in the later 1740s offered easy credit to American merchants, pressing them to take more goods. These merchants in turn competed with new American shop⁸⁹ Cited in Breen, The Marketplace, 131. ⁹⁰ Daniel Flexney to John Reynell, 9 Feb. 1737, 11 Feb. 1738, 8 Aug. 1738, John Reynell Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. One faggott was equal to 120 lbs of steel. See Colin Chapman, How Heavy, How Much and How Long? Weights, Money and Other Measures Used by our Ancestors (Dursley, 1995), Table 5.37. ⁹¹ Michael Lee Dicker to John Reynell, 6 Sept. 1736, John Reynell Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

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A Nation of Shoppers keepers dealing direct with suppliers in England. The desperate straits of merchants caught out in the floods of English goods dispatched to the USA immediately after the Revolution were expressed by the Clifford brothers, the one in Philadelphia, the other in Bristol. John Clifford in Philadelphia appealed to his brother in Bristol ‘for all the assistance a brother can give me’. ‘Your market is overdone with goods, and there is reason to expect the return to be a long time coming about.’ His brother’s reply was little more than censorious. ‘I am sorry to find your markets so much overdone with English goods, and wishing you may be able to dispose of them without a loss . . . but I was in hopes that Bristol goods would have continued somewhat longer in demand. I would recommend my brother to be very cautious of having anything to do with people that have gone out with cargoes of goods from Europe, and upon no account to meddle with their bills.’⁹² Success depended on a fine balance on credit terms, the timing of sales, and profitability. Methods of conducting trade varied with colony and region.⁹³ In the Chesapeake, there was a ‘northern’ and ‘southern’; the former group of merchants conducted trade through Glasgow, Liverpool, and Whitehaven, and ran chains of stores in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The latter dealt with London and Bristol, and operated as commission merchants. Commission merchants took tobacco on commission, and sold British ‘cargo’ goods on credit. Credit terms varied by good. Merchants in the early 1770s found London suppliers ready to sell silk on fifteen months’ credit, but linen, woollens, and ironmongery on twelve; chinaware by contrast had to be paid for in six months. Long credit was most readily available in the large merchant houses in London, but cash or early payment could also yield substantial discounts. Bristol firms offered American merchants 7 to 7.5 per cent discount of orders of nails bought with cash or bills of exchange of 30–40 days; after the American Revolution they offered 7.5 per cent on exports of glassware and 10 per cent discounts for those of Queen’s ware paid with ready money. The Bristol merchants, in turn, could get even better terms from their Birmingham suppliers who offered discounts of 10 to 20 per cent on goods in return for cash payments. These terms varied from 7.5 per cent on buckles or 10 per cent on buttons to 15 per cent on tea tongs and 20 per cent on boxes.⁹⁴ ⁹² Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 119; Jacob M. Price, Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook, 1771–1774 (London, 1979), introd., p. xv; Jensen, Maritime Commerce, 103; Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit, 169; Clifford Family Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. ⁹³ An extensive discussion of business and credit networks is provided in Morgan, ‘Business Networks’. ⁹⁴ Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, 108–9.

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Mercantile Theatres The most common form of business in the Philadelphia trade was for the Philadelphia merchant to open a line of credit with a merchant house in England using a bill of exchange. He would then order a shipment worth several times the value of the bill, but had to make payment within twelve months. He then sold these goods to retailers in Philadelphia again on credit, but with cash from some customers could buy more bills of exchange and send these to England to start the process of paying off his merchant supplier.⁹⁵ Some merchants started off even smaller, such as John Reynell, who began in the 1720s by selling goods for English merchants on commission, and as he accumulated gradually came to trade on his own account. Another merchant, James Beekman in New York, started his business in 1750 with a stock passed to him by his father, Gerard Beekman, of dry goods, tea, teapots, combs, and pewterware worth £1,000 in New York money. He dealt initially with three pedlars to whom he advanced short-term credit. One of these, Robert Gregg, packed a stock of shoe and knee buckles, silver and brass buttons, combs, caps, teaspoons, penknives, needles and pins, handkerchiefs, thread, and garters. Beekman went on to deal with many shopkeepers and tradesmen, a number of them women.⁹⁶ Cargoes ordered by particular merchants or supplied through particular London or Bristol dealers were frequently very small and very diverse. John Reynell of Philadelphia received cargoes in the 1730s for amounts ranging from £5 5s. to £97 6s. One included fabrics, silks, caps, gloves, books, and thirty bags of scarf buttons.There was another for £18 14s. 22d. for files, brass handles, locks, and escutcheons. A larger order for £282 1s. 1d. included ten crates of earthenware, all minutely specified as mustard pots, sugar pots and teawares, a cask with sixteen copper tea kettles, blankets, cambrics, and casks of alum and brimstone. But the value of most of the cargo included the passages and clothes for seven servants travelling on the ship. In the 1760s when Peter Stuyvesant of New York sent his coffee to be traded in London, he asked for small quantities of china dishes, tureens, ivory-handled knives and forks, and wine glasses.The merchant house, Devonshire Rees & Loyd, sent from Birmingham via Bristol in 1761 a huge order for Jones & Wister of Philadelphia.This order, valued at £1,369 1s. 10d., gathered dozens of various types of buckles, shoe pincers, buttons, as well as japanned snuffers, candlesticks, snuff boxes, silver watch chains, spectacles, brass watch keys, and ninety casks of nails. The same Bristol firm sent goods to Boston in 1764 in several separate shipments valued from £884 16s. to £2,683 14s. 10d. to ⁹⁵ Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit, 169–70. ⁹⁶ Jensen, Maritime Commerce, 93; White, The Beekmans of New York, 345, 362, 391–2.

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A Nation of Shoppers £3,417 14s. 5d. The shipments were all mixes of nails, knives, pins, shoe buckles, candlesticks, japanned boxes and snuff boxes, glasses, ceramics, stockings, and fabrics.⁹⁷ American merchants had difficulty dealing directly with their suppliers. Joshua Johnson made a tour of the midlands manufacturing districts in the spring of 1772, but he could not find any ‘large warehouses well stocked’, and most producers appeared to deal with merchants in London and Bristol; if producers in Birmingham did sell they wanted ready money. He complained to the firm in April and June: ‘The agents who reside in these towns employ the poor men and their families for ten or a dozen miles round them . . . they deliver them as much iron etc. as they can work up in a week which is returned on Saturday night when they are paid for their labour . . . The agents as soon as they collect a load, send it immediately to the principal or correspondent in London, Bristol etc. and draw at 20 days’ sight for the amount which is generally discounted at the banks or passed as our bills with you does . . . I am convinced one may always do better in London.’ In June he complained again. ‘You recommend to me to get our ironware and cutlery from Birmingham. It’s impossible to do it; I have not the money and I must pay in a month at farthest.’ He concluded, ‘I observe what you say about Birmingham. I went there with intent to make our purchases from time to time, but on finding their credit was only 6 months, I saw it would not do, that we had it not in our power to make payments at the time, which compelled me to decline any thoughts of being served from there.’⁹⁸ Johnson’s experiences, however, only underlined the importance of contacts and sociability. A few years before, in 1767, Samuel Rowland Fisher, a wholesale importer running packet ships between Philadelphia and London, did his first tour of the midlands manufacturing districts.This was followed by further trips after the Revolution in 1783 and 1784. Unlike Johnson he was well connected through Quaker friendships, and with suitable introductions and an extensive round of tea drinking, secured his object of bypassing London purchasing agents and dealing direct with the factories. In Sheffield Fisher visited John Hoyland who took him to his brother’s well-known works making plated ware and tortoise shell boxes. He breakfasted there, dined and drank tea there, and went with the Hoylands to the ⁹⁷ Flexney to Reynell, 9 Feb. 1937, 17 Aug. 1737, July 1738, Reynell Papers; Peter Stuyvesant Letters, 27 Feb. 1762, New York Historical Society; Invoice from Devonshire Rees & Loyd for Jones & Wister, Birmingham, 13 Aug. 1761, Jones & Wister Papers, Philadelphia; Sales Charges and Proceeds of Sundry Merchandise, on risk of Nathaniel Barrell; for Boston, The National Archives, Chancery Masters Exhibits, Forsaith vs. Forsaith, C110/163. ⁹⁸ Price, Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook, p. xiv; Letters, 17 Apr., 22 June, and 20 Aug., 1772, pp. 33, 39, 44.

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Mercantile Theatres workshops of several cutlers where he made his orders. In Birmingham he went to W. W. & Startins the toymakers, then Clay’s, the celebrated warehouse for Japan goods, and on to a candlestick and buckle maker.There were other visits to the workshops, foundries, and warehouses of Nemiah and Sampson Lloyd, George Boone, Welch Wilkinson, Richard Dearman, and others. At all of these he drank tea, did business, made orders and agreements, viewed mills, steam engines, and canals, and drank tea again. He went on to Kidderminster, Stourbridge, and Lichfield. His business was interspersed with visits, dining and drinking, conversation with wives and daughters, and attendance at Quaker meetings. It was thus that a profitable transfer of goods from Britain to America was struck; the trade was conducted through social and religious connection and transatlantic dining and drinking rituals.⁹⁹ He dealt in the full range of manufactured goods from ornamental brassware and japanned goods to nails and fabric. And his example was similar to that of others who travelled the British trade routes, including John Warder, Josiah Trumball, and Joshua Gilpin. Like Bernard Mandeville’s example of sugar merchants making their deals through rounds of hospitality in the relaxed atmosphere of the country retreat, Samuel Rowland Fisher understood the significance of breakfast and tea. Fisher’s practice of direct dealing with specific producers was only an extension of long-established practices of setting up close connections with specific retailers, shops, or merchants in London, Bristol, or Birmingham or wherever goods were best obtained in the quality, design, and time desired. Samuel Powell, a Philadelphia Quaker and merchant, ordered a great mixture of goods in 1724 ranging from tortoiseshell knives, ivory combs, watch glasses, and brass watch keys, to stirrup irons, girth buckles, and books from a range of individuals: Thomas Plumsted, Thomas Faster, William Rolfe, Edward Simon, and Thomas Wedges. John Jenks, a merchant from Salem, Massachusetts, imported from England between 1787 and 1799 goods ranging from thumb latches, drawer handles, and shoe buckles to Britannia teapots, chandeliers, and organ pipes. He went to Thomas Watkins of Birmingham for shoe buckles, Willliam Wilson of London for japanned shoe buckles, J. Blakesly & Sons, London, for ivory and tortoiseshell combs, and Thomas Wilkinson, also of London, for looking glasses and oval tea boards. Guppy and Armstrong of Bristol supplied him with gilt frames and glass, teapots, buckles and buttons, and a wide range of plated ware. Several ⁹⁹ Samuel Rowland Fisher’s Manuscript Journal, Microfilm, Winterthur Library and Museum, Nov. 1783; see also Charles F. Hummel, ‘Samuel Rowland Fisher’s Catalogue of English Hardware’, Winterthur Portfolio, 1 (1964), 188–97.

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A Nation of Shoppers others filled orders for candlesticks, silverware, watches, and books. William Beekman in New York also dealt directly with individual manufacturers or merchant manufacturers such as Thomas Owen, the Bristol hat manufacturer, or Robert and Nathan Hyde, the Manchester cotton manufacturers and merchants.¹⁰⁰ The merchants dealt on their home ground with the colonial stores, or retailed direct to their consumers. The shoppers and shopkeepers that proliferated in Britain found their match in the American colonies.The variety and sophistication of the goods displayed by colonial storekeepers in face of risk and whimsy are the stuff of Tim Breen’s heady accounts, and will not detain us here.¹⁰¹ Their advertising bears closer investigation.

Advertising: Quality, Variety, and Novelty Merchants combined their attention to the detail of discriminating choice with insistence on the variety and quality of the goods they exported to the American colonies. This care was also reflected in the way British goods were advertised in American newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Gazette. The characteristics of the goods, centred as they were on the pleasures of anticipation, made them ideal conveyers of the subliminal messages of advertising. The advertising of new consumer goods was much more extensive and highly sophisticated in colonial newspapers than in British. This was possibly due to the geographical distance between producers and consumers. British producers and retailers may have preferred alternative forms of advertising such as trade cards, or there were perhaps different traditions of newspaper advertising between colonial and metropolitan print culture. Tim Breen provides a good account of the changes in merchant notices in colonial newspapers during the middle third of the eighteenth century. Advertisers set out long detailed lists of goods, but with attention to layout, design, and typeface which were set to attract the eye of the reader. He found a great jump in the number of goods advertised between the 1730s and the 1770s, and an elaboration of descriptive categories of goods in the New York City newspapers, the South-Carolina Gazette, the Boston Evening Post, and the Pennsylvania Gazette.¹⁰² Advertising provided the dominant source of revenue for American newspapers, and the Pennsylvania Gazette from 1728 to 1800 was the major purveyor of political and social comment, news and ¹⁰⁰ Samuel Powel’s London Order Book, Philadelphia, 1724, Joseph Downs Collection 232, 10 Winterthur Library, Winterthur, Delaware; John Jenks Papers 1751–1817, Joseph Downs Collection 295, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum; White, The Beekmans of New York, 446–8. ¹⁰¹ Breen, The Marketplace, 118–32. ¹⁰² Ibid. 54–8, 133–5.

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Mercantile Theatres Table 8.6. Goods categories advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1740–1790

Earthenware Enamelled ware Japanned ware Plated ware

1740–8

1750–8

1760–8

1770–8

1780–90

6 — — 1

30 16 6 22

19 27 43 29

5 13 17 16

— 7 13 20

Note: Numbers of advertisements sampled at two-yearly intervals. Source: Database of Advertisements in the Pennsylvania Gazette. Maxine Berg, University of Warwick. The Pennsylvania Gazette On-line Version. Accessible Archives.

advertisements not just for America’s largest city, but for the colonies more generally. Sophisticated and detailed advertisements scripted the meaning, connections, and appeal of the goods. Many of the characteristic new British consumer goods described in this book were advertised in its pages. The searchable version of the newspaper, available through Accessible Archives, allows keyword searches of over 100,000 records. A sample of the records over two-year intervals from 1740 to 1790 was made on goods described as earthenware, enamelled, japanned, and plated. Goods in many types with one of these attributes became most closely associated with British products. Advertisements described the goods as ‘sundry sorts’, as a ‘variety’, ‘good’ or ‘large assortment’, ‘all sorts’, or ‘large and elegant stock’. There were frequent references to price: ‘very cheap for ready money’, ‘sold at prime cost’, or ‘will sell very reasonable from the vessel’. Earthenware is frequently described in the advertisements, just as it was in the Customs Accounts, only in the most general of ways, but still many adverts went into detail on objects, colours, patterns, and especially made reference to Queen’s ware and blue and white. One particularly striking advertisement in April 1776 elaborated in detail on Queen’s ware, describing enamelled, striped, fluted, pierced, and plain Queen’s ware teapots, a similar range of coffee pots,‘of the urn shape’, sugar dishes, tea and coffee cups and saucers, bowls and cream pots, described in varieties as red China, black, white, blue and white, enamelled stone, cauliflower, enamelled, striped, fluted, and plain Queen’s ware. The advertisement went on to describe a large range of other earthenware objects. Much of the chinaware, as well as snuff boxes, brassware, and silverware, was also described as enamelled ware. In October 1764, there were ‘beautiful enamelled wine glasses, with cut stems’; in December, 1764 there was ‘a very ~ 321 ~

A Nation of Shoppers large assortment of enamelled and blue and white china’. In August 1766 came a shipment from London of ‘silver, enamelled, frosted and feathered plumes and egrets (the above articles all in the newest and genteelest taste)’. September 1768 brought from London and Bristol ‘ebony, white, bone, stag, enamelled, buck and sham buck carving knives and forks’. And in December 1772 there were ‘enamelled gilt mounted snuff boxes and sleeve buttons’, as well as ‘Two very neat enamelled arch dials’. In April 1776 Joseph Stansbury advertised the sale of his ‘large and elegant Stock of China, Glass and Earthenware’ from his store in Second Street, Philadelphia. His extended advertisement, which covers much of a large page, included ‘rich and enamelled tea table setts compleat, rich enamelled table plates, enamelled pickle shells and mustard pots, rich myrtle pots and stands’, and many other similarly detailed items. Japanned goods were advertised as from London, Liverpool, Bristol, and Glasgow. They were ‘of a very large variety’, and ranged from japanned tea boards and snuffers to smelling bottles in japanned cases, japanned shoe and knee buckles, or a neat japanned and gilt clock. One advert in May 1772 gave up on the descriptors: ‘a variety of the most fashionable japanned ware, consisting of square and round waiters, from 9 to 24 inches, square and 8 square bread baskets, quadrille pools, bottle stands, paper boxes, and sundry other articles, too tedious to mention’. The plated ware was frequently described as ‘new or newest fashion’, or ‘neatest plated’ and ‘neat assortment’. This too was all manner of objects.¹⁰³ Newspaper advertising had its counterpart, as we have seen in trade cards, pattern books, and trade catalogues. The famous Birmingham brassware catalogues were especially produced for foreign markets, and these eighteenth-century catalogues can be found in American libraries in their hundreds even today.¹⁰⁴ Containing highly realistic illustration of designs, components, and sizes they were a major investment in engravings to provide close detail on product design and manufacture. They were sold by manufacturers to agents or clients. They were frequently anonymous, and were used by agents who did not want their customers to discover the sources of their wares. Prices were written in by hand, or set out in separate handwritten or printed lists. Samuel Rowland Fisher carried about his own 146-page catalogue of Birmingham brassware, its remarkable engravings ¹⁰³ The advertisements described in this section are taken from the Pennsylvania Gazette. See especially, advertisement by Joseph Stansbury for this stock of china, glass, and earthen wares, 24 Apr. 1776. ¹⁰⁴ These trade catalogues are discussed in Berg and Clifford, ‘Commerce and the Commodity’, 187–200, esp. pp. 197–9. Also see T. R. Crom, Trade Catalogues 1542–1842 (Melrose, Fla., 1976).

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Mercantile Theatres

Fig. 8.3. Trade catalogue with Sheffield teapot, Illustrated Catalogue of Plate and Base Metalware. c.1800. RBR NK2750 M58. FTC. The Winterthur Library.

conveying variety in size, choice in design, combinations for good taste, and codes for accessible credit and prices.¹⁰⁵ The catalogues, moreover, advertised product groups for their American customers. Fisher’s catalogue advertised brass furniture ware alongside rococo watch frames and stands; Jee, Eginton & Company listed and illustrated a whole variety of metal ornamental goods set out to complement each other. Benjamin Hadley’s catalogue set out tea and coffee urns alongside candlesticks and glass pitchers, and James Whitehead set out examples of his earthenware in combination with his plated ware.¹⁰⁶ American advertising thus branded British new consumer goods; consumption and consumer goods, moreover, depicted as culture. A transatlantic consumer culture was made in the histories of key consumer products. Leading consumer goods—glass and earthenware, brassware, ornamental steel and plated ware, japanned ware, and small furnishings—became world-class commodities. Their Britishness became synonymous with fashion, quality, and variety as well as price competitiveness. These were ¹⁰⁵ Hummel, ‘Samuel Rowland Fisher’s Catalogue’; Catalogue of English Hardware (Birmingham, 1783–9) [Samuel Rowland Fisher], Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. ¹⁰⁶ Catalogue of English Hardware [Fisher]; Benjamin Hadley, Trade Catalogue, 1815, Winterthur Museum; James Whitehead, Designs for Sundry Articles of Earthen-Ware, Winterthur Museum, 1798.

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A Nation of Shoppers goods made for international markets, and exports especially targeted North American consumers. Indeed the characteristics of the products were defined and revised in response to the fastidious demands of American merchants and customers. Key consumer goods led the way; and their invention and marketing as British is a story of that Atlantic world. British commodities, initially inspired as a response to the Indian Ocean trade in luxury goods, honed their success as international commodities on the Atlantic world. The plantations and cities around the Atlantic rim looked outward to each other across what John Elliott has called a ‘European lake’, and not inwards to Europe on the one hand or the American hinterlands on the other. These societies were Atlantic; migration was their ‘ordinary activity’, and this was movement of peoples, commodities, and cultural practices. The success the British made of that migration from the seventeenth century onwards provided the potential markets, what Adam Smith had called the ‘vent for surplus’ that France never had. Less than 200,000 French men and women emigrated to its colonies over the course of the eighteenth century; small change beside the 1.8 million English and Scots who did. The white French populations of Canada and the French West Indies in the early 1760s was just over 110,000; the English North American colonies were populated by 2 million by the mid-eighteenth century, and 3 million by its end. This was, as Colin Jones concludes, ‘a more economically stimulating demand base’ than that offered by the French colonies.¹⁰⁷ Colonial fortunes and young, upwardly mobile migrants, keen not just to succeed but to demonstrate that success, provided diverse and discerning markets for British products. These North American markets were no dumping ground for shoddy or outmoded goods; merchants in these competitive markets only succeeded with quality at the best price. British goods, so successful in supplying Britain’s own diaspora, soon invaded the markets of the rest of the Atlantic world. Britain and her North American colonies supplied manufactured goods to France’s Caribbean colonies, despite trade restrictions; the end of the Seven Years War passed the extensive markets of Spanish America from French to British dominance. These Atlantic markets provided the best kind of target for the product development that went into developing new commodities. Products that met the demanding standards of a predominantly middling-class con¹⁰⁷ Jones, The Great Nation, 164–5. On the Atlantic World see David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, and J. H. Elliott, ‘Afterward: Atlantic History. A Circumnavigation’, in Armitage and Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 11–30 and 233–49, esp. pp. 19–21, 234–7. An early proposal for Atlantic history is posed in Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario, 20 (1996), 19–44.

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Mercantile Theatres stituency would also succeed in wider international markets. The British Atlantic world extended to Britain a global advantage denied to the Asian producers who had once prevailed over luxury goods production. It was an advantage missed out on by her European competitors after British naval and imperial pre-eminence from the mid-eighteenth century. That advantage was, to be sure, one of an extended land periphery, a relief from Malthusian constraints on population growth, a source of raw materials and investment opportunities.¹⁰⁸ The global advantage was also the potential markets fostered in unfamiliar spaces among acculturated migrants; these became consumers for new British products. Demand and supply, consumption and technology have for too long provided competing and polarized accounts of Britain’s industrial revolution. Creating consumers and inventing technologies integrated product and process; Britain’s industrial revolution was simultaneously a product revolution. The British products which seized global markets in the early nineteenth century as a part of the success story of the industrial revolution were made in the transatlantic consumer culture of the eighteenth century. ¹⁰⁸ See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, 2000), 264–85. On the exploitation of ‘new world bounty’ see Nuala Zahedieh, The Capital and Commerce: London and the Atlantic Economy in the Late Seventeenth Century (forthcoming), ch. 1.

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Conclusion Those new British goods so enthusiastically invented, produced, shopped for, and displayed were also the subjects of introspection, misgivings, and social exclusion. Young James Bisset’s painted and japanned snuff boxes may have been delightful, but he worked twelve-hour days, painting ‘upwards of twenty gross of snuff boxes in a week with roses, anemonies and various coloured flowers with three tints to every flower and three to every leaf ’.¹ William Pegg, a highly esteemed porcelain painter at the Derby porcelain works, when apprenticed to china painting at the beginning of the 1780s, worked fifteen-hour days with only Sundays to study drawing and the arts.² Pegg became a Baptist, then a Quaker; his religious scruples over using his artistic skills to minister to ‘mere luxury’, for ‘articles more of show than use’, forced him to abandon his trade not once, but twice. Joseph Priestley, as we have seen, maintained radical religious convictions alongside a richly endowed consumer environment. Pegg, self-taught in his theology, took a stricter line. Leaving porcelain painting, he moved to Bedworth then Hinckley in Leicestershire where he took up stocking knitting. He earned but a pittance, and fell into poverty, debt, and despair, so much so that he was asked by the Friends to leave Hinckley. He passed ‘twelve years of poverty and discomfort in the prime of life’ when ‘I did not earn enough to clear my expenses, so that I kept sinking all the time, and at the end of that period I was in a state of embarrassment, tho’ I had received some small assistance. Even the Friends with whom I stood in social connexion manifested their disapprobation of the sacrifice I had made.’ Ultimately Pegg returned to the china works, having ‘lost that feeling which induced me to give up china painting’. He once again took to study¹ Memoir of James Bisset, 72. ² William Pegg’s story is told from his manuscript chronicle of his life and his letters by John Haslem, The Old Derby China Factory: The Workmen and their Productions (London, 1876; repr. Wakefield, 1973), 70–96.

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Conclusion ing the art of painting, though he had once burned all his drawings and drawing books. His return to his craft lasted seven years before he again felt ‘increasing feelings of condemnation’: ‘I now do wish I could take myself to some other business for a living, which if I do not, I feel sure that my peace of mind is broken. I have long felt, and been inwardly convinced, that I was acting contrary to what was required of me, in taking to and continuing in the China business.’³ William Pegg’s crisis was not one over his possessions, but over the meaning of his work. He now found abhorrent those objects of luxury, ornament, and delight which over the course of the eighteenth century had inspired such inventiveness among his fellow artisans and tradespeople as well as acquisitiveness among the middling classes and the elites. Montesquieu’s commerce was not so sweet, not so inclusive or civilizing as the English paradox in favour of luxury appeared to convey. Not only did luxury, even if for the middling classes, arise from inequality. Luxury also penetrated the psychology, and consumer objects took power over self-identity. Social theorists at the end of the eighteenth century turned the discussion of consumer society to the search for the sources of inequality.⁴ James Bisset and William Pegg both reflected on their work; for the one it was a mechanical activity that yielded a high output; for the other it was a pandering to consumer idolatry. Both connected their work to the consumer goods they produced. Let us reiterate Adam Smith’s statement, ‘consumption is the sole end of production’. He put the point more sharply: ‘The desire for objects of frivolous utility . . . keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.’⁵ Consumption needs to be connected with production. Luxury and Pleasure is not only a book about modern consumer society and its products during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; it is a book about the origins of industrialization. At this crucial stage Europe responded to a commodity trade with the wider world; inventing, producing, and consuming new European, and especially British goods provoked the changes in technologies, the uses of new materials and forms of energy, and the reorganization of labour that became the industrial revolution. World markets stimulated this process in the first place; success then led to global ascendancy. For international and well as home markets were what ‘identified’ British goods; global markets for those consumer goods of private and ³ Ibid. 92. ⁴ Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates’, in Berg and Eger (eds.), Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, 1–27, p. 22; Edward Hundert, ‘Mandeville, Rousseau and the Political Economy of Fantasy’, ibid. 28–40. ⁵ Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, i. iii. 2, pp. 50–2.

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Conclusion domestic life inspired the industrial revolution; they also underpinned a success story that the British turned into their own throughout the following century. What happened in the nineteenth century to these products that had ‘won the world’ is another question. The products multiplied, newly democratized and available to all. The romantics rejected the ‘principles of taste’ associated with an ordered society, pursuing a synthesis of historical and non-European designs. Visual choice was now so available that the early Victorians saw their ‘present age’ as one ‘with no style which can properly be called its own’.⁶ For some this cacophony of choice needed ‘reordering’; a new business for the professional design reformers. For others this was the true mark of the plenitude achieved by British industrialization. The marginal economist, Philip Wicksteed, in a marked departure from the presentation of use and exchange values developed by Smith, Ricardo, and Marx, wrote of ‘a vast number of things which I desire’ entering into a ‘circle of exchange’ based on choice.⁷ The choice and availability of objects were not enough to ensure their international supremacy. Industrial tourists who in the eighteenth century had been captivated by the ‘Magazin Anglais’, by the early years of the nineteenth century had lost their enthusiasm.⁸ Though entranced by the technologies they witnessed in Britain, they were not impressed with the products they saw. These were ‘grotesque and tasteless’, or of poor quality. A German visitor wrote: ‘woollen cloths and cashmeres are not so good as those made in France while printed calicoes are much inferior to those made on the continent’. The Italian visitor, Lanza, later attributed this lack of taste and quality to the English pursuit of ‘utility’ at the expense of ‘beauty’.⁹ The Great Exhibition of 1851, which celebrated the achievements of British technology, was also an initiative to improve standards of manufacturing and to educate the public in matters of taste.¹⁰ As such it was not a success. William Morris, who visited the exhibition as a young man, found the objects inside it ‘wonderfully ugly’; critics found the omnium gatherum of Victorian goods an ‘artistic disaster’.¹¹ Was this the ⁶ Michael Snodin, ‘Style’ and ‘Who Led Taste’, in Snodin and Styles (eds.), Design and the Decorative Arts, 342, 369. ⁷ See Asa Briggs, Victorian Things (Harmondsworth, 1988), 15. ⁸ Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets, 113–26. ⁹ ‘Escher’s Letters’, in Henderson, Industrial Britain under the Regency, 31, 33 and F. Lanza, Viaggio in Inghilterra e nella Scozia (Trieste, 1859), both cited in Riello and O’Brien, ‘Reconstructing the Industrial Revolution’, 17–18. ¹⁰ Paul Greenhalgh, ‘The Great Exhibition’, in Snodin and Styles (eds.), Design and the Decorative Arts, 376–9. ¹¹ Briggs, Victorian Things, 53; Greenhalgh, ‘The Great Exhibition’, 377.

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Conclusion apotheosis of the work, technology, the art and industry, and the global trade which had made the product revolution of the eighteenth century? The new technologies and materials, the response to exotic and Asian luxuries, the marketing of new-invented products to the middling classes—this extensive consumption of new goods—signalled the modernity of the British in the eighteenth century. But technology, the factory, choice, and democracy were all blamed by the mid-nineteenth century for a loss of direction. Taste needed to be controlled for the ‘good of the nation’, and choice directed to signify social identity. This Victorian ‘overproduction’ of goods, styles, and choice became the harbinger of a new modernity, the mass culture and its associated mass consumption of Western economic development in the twentieth century.That mass consumer society of the mid-twentieth century was the occasion for social and political investigation of a distinctive social concept, ‘consumer society’ and the social conformism and political passivity associated with it. A new left critique provided the vehicle of a fresh wave of cultural criticism and radical resistance. This was, in turn, overtaken by a postmodern debate connecting consumption to choice and identity.¹² An intense interest in origins of consumer society has pervaded history, the social sciences, and popular culture during the past twenty-five years. Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood in their seminal The World of Goods, first published in 1978, argued that ‘goods, work and consumption’ had to be restored to their unity, and set together into the social process.¹³ Theirs was an argument with economists; but social and cultural theorists and historians since have abstracted consumption. ‘Consumption’, disembodied, semiotic, has in Agnew’s words, ‘expanded to fill the available analytical space’.¹⁴ Social identities defined by consumer society make no reference to the goods or how they are made. We need to restore that unity between consumption and production—in twenty-five years we have not done this. What we do know a great deal more about is why people buy goods. We are also constantly aware of the global framework of this consumer society. A global consumer society is not any invention of the post Cold War world, but the very foundation of the industrial world. We have seen how, over the course of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, consumer goods from Asia were transformed into our own European and Western com¹² Brewer, ‘The Error of our Ways’; Trentmann, ‘Beyond Consumerism’, esp. pp. 373–6. ¹³ Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption (Harmondsworth, 1978), 4. ¹⁴ Agnew, ‘Coming up for Air’, 30; cf. Brewer, ‘The Error of our Ways’.

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Conclusion modities, and endowed with meanings in a new consumer culture. Wedgwood’s pleasure in displacing ceramics production from Asia to Europe is another global story today. Manufacturing consumer goods has once again become a story of Asia, transposed this time from Europe and America: those classic British products, Wedgwood and Royal Doulton, have transferred production to China.¹⁵ Luxury and Pleasure has attempted to restore something of that unity— goods, work, and consumption—in its framework of conception, making, and shopping. But it investigates only a very few consumer goods in any depth, and neglects the social framework of credit and debt that made the making and buying of these goods possible. Other studies have addressed some of these gaps, but much still remains to be done.¹⁶ This book conveys the optimistic reception by enlightened observers of the spread of consumer goods and the expansion of world commerce; it investigates the consumer roots of industrialization. But there are also more disturbing stories that need to be told: of consumerism and the growth of inequality, of the transformation of wider world discovery and world trade into slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. Consumer boycotts against British goods, identified with imperial power and infringement of liberty, fuelled radical protest and helped to shape the American Revolution. Other consumer protests in Britain and America against the systems of slavery that brought sugar to the tea tables of Europe and the Atlantic world gave voice and coherence to dissenting values and feminist consciousness.¹⁷ Other wider world perspectives show the history of the part played by imperial and global goods in the widening social inequalities across the North–South divide.¹⁸ Those issues over the goods and the imperial and class power they entailed were at the heart of the debate on consumption when Douglas and Isherwood called for that unity in the study of consumption and production. Indeed The World of Goods opened with the statement: ‘There is obloquy for merchandising and guilt in ownership. A growing swell of protest ¹⁵ The Guardian, 5 June 2003, p. 2; The Guardian, G2, 11 June 2003, p. 2; The Guardian, Society Guardian, 29 May 2002, pp. 2–3. ¹⁶ See e.g. Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite, and her Dress, Culture and Commerce. On credit see Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998) and Finn, The Character of Credit. ¹⁷ Breen, The Marketplace; Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London, 1992); Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford, Calif., 2000); also see the essays in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (eds.), The Politics of Consumption (Oxford, 2001). ¹⁸ See e.g. Arnold J. Bauer, Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge, 2001). See also C. A. Bayly’s global history of the long nineteenth century: The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004).

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Conclusion against the consumer society sets the background to this book.’¹⁹ Paradoxically, a book written in this political context of protest against consumer society led the way into the intense study of consumption and consumerism among social scientists, cultural theorists, and historians. Now consumer society is not in question. The citizen is a consumer; the modern self reflects on his or her desires.There is a sense in which those desires in our own age are more about the experience of consuming than they are about fixed possessions. Consumers take part in the context within which goods lay; advertisers dematerialize the object into its contextual signs and symbols.²⁰ Consuming, however, still relies on a growing flow of material objects, objects now made in parts of the world other than where they are mainly consumed.The globalization that now frames consumption remains fundamentally about products and their production. And the history of those consumer desires must also be a history of the products. Any historical discussion of consumption needs to be reconnected to the goods and how they are made; this must be a response to world trade now, as it was in the past. In the eighteenth century a global trade in luxuries and manufactured consumer goods provided not just the labour and the materials that went into making of new goods, but the designs, fashions, and sophisticated marketing that shaped the product development of the period. Consumer products, if not consumption more broadly, were forged then in a global economy. This world history of the products and their production processes is vital to any history of consumption and consumers; it is equally vital to our current understandings of globalization. ¹⁹ Douglas and Isherwood, The World of Goods, 3. ²⁰ Richard Sennett, ‘Consumer’ Lecture series, ‘The Culture of the New Capitalism’, Rothermere American Institute, Oxford, 18 May 2004.

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Select Bibliography manuscript sources Birmingham Central Library, City Archives Address to the Inhabitants of Birmingham from A Friend to Birmingham and the Constitution (29 Apr. 1793), 325311. Birmingham Button Disputes, MSS, George Madeley (16 Aug. 1799). Birmingham Riots, Inventory of the House and Goods of Joseph Priestley, 399801/IIR30. Diary of Julius Hardy (1788–93), Button-Maker, of Birmingham, 669002, MS 218. Matthew Boulton Papers, 307, 330/331, 361, DBF, Letter Books. Bodleian Library, Oxford John Johnson Collection of trade cards. Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York Sheffield Probate Records. Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Library and Museum, Wilmington, Delaware Benjamin Hadley, Trade Catalogue, 1815. John Jenks Papers 1751–1817, Joseph Downs Collection 295. Samuel Powell, London Order Book, Philadelphia, 1724, Joseph Downs Collection 232, 1. Samuel Rowland Fisher, manuscript journal, microfilm, Nov. 1783. [Samuel Rowland Fisher], Catalogue of English Hardware (Birmingham, 1783–9). Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Clifford Family Papers. John Reynell Papers. Owen Jones Papers, Jones & Wister Letterbook. Keele University Archives Wedgwood Papers, Correspondence.

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Bibliography Lichfield Joint Record Office Birmingham Probate Records. National Archives, London Inspector generals’ ledgers of imports and exports, PRO, Cust. 3. Chancery Masters Exhibits George and William Panter, C112/61. Nathaniel Barrell, Forsaith v. Forsaith, C110/163. Nathaniel Torriano, C112/24. Vulliamy (Order Book for Silver), C104/58 Part 1. New York Historical Society, New York Peter Stuyvesant Letters. Royal Society of Arts Archives, London Josiah Tucker, ‘The Elements of Commerce and Theory of Taxes’, Society of Arts, Commerce, and Manufactures, MS, 1755. Society of Arts, Commerce, and Manufactures, Guard Books. Sheffield City Archives Bradbury Records. Thomas Nowill (1786–1825) Papers. Stafford Record Office Hicken Glass Business, Bilston, Staffs., D1798/647. Whieldon Papers, Notebook on Hiring and Wages. Warwick County Record Office Memoir of James Bisset (1818), CR1526/246.

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~ 356 ~

Index Aberdeen 212 Ackerman, Rudolph 90–1 Adam, Robert 256 Adams, John 297 Adams, William 149 Addison, Thomas 303–4 advertising 87 and fashion 197 and metal trades 185–8 in newspapers 271–2 American colonies 320–2 and patents 179 and pattern books 186–7, 277–8 and product innovation 270 and promotional culture of 271 and trade cards 186, 197, 272–7 and trade catalogues 147–8, 186–7, 277–8 in American colonies 322–3 aesthetics: and consumer goods 88–9 and principles of beauty 88–9 Africa, trade with 183 Agnew, Jean-Christophe 12, 329 Ainslie, Robert 143 Akerman, John 124 Albrechtsburg Castle 126 Alcock, Michael 189 Alcock and Kempson 171 Alexander, William 84 Alken, Samuel 133 American colonies: and advertising: in newspapers 320–2 trade catalogues 322–3 and British goods 279–80, 304–6 boycott of 299 buckles and buttons 306–7 candlesticks 310–11 clothing 302–3 demand for 296, 298–9 earthenware 308–9 fashion dominance of 302–4 furniture 311–13 general hardware 310 luxury debate over 297–8, 299–300 mirrors 313–14 silverware 310–11

tableware 307 teaware 309–10 and British material culture of 289, 305 and British perceptions of 295 and economic development of 289–90 and emigration to 291 and growing wealth of 291–3 and imports 284–6, 289 categories of 287–8 mercantile practices 314–20 and representation of values 288–9 and lack of manufacturing 294 as market 144–5, 183 and national identity 300–1 adoption of English heritage 295–6, 305 Britishness 295, 301–2 print culture 294–5 and Navigation Laws 290 and newspapers 294–5 and population growth 291 and Puritanism 296 and sources of imports 290 and taxation of 299 and transatlantic consumer culture 324–5 and urban growth 293–4 Amoy 66 Amsterdam 78 Anderson, Adam 93–4 Anderson, Benedict 7, 294 Anderton, Elizabeth 240 Angerstein, Reinhold 14 Anti-Gallican Association 95 Appadurai, Arjun 30 Archenholtz, Johann von 39, 264 Archer, James 138 Argand Lamp 115 Arita 67 artificial flowers 106 arts: and ceramics decoration 133–4, 137 and liberal/mechanical division of 99, 100–1, 104 and manufacturing 88, 91–3, 95, 96, 98–9 and meaning of ‘art’ 99 and promotion of knowledge 101 Asia: and adapting to European markets 68

~ 357 ~

Index Asia (cont.): and early economic development 58–60 and failure of economic growth 58 and imports from 19–20, 24–5, 130 and production for European markets 62–7 and production processes 60–2 and trade with 49–57 impact of 46 marketing 70–2 mechanics of 72–5 opening of 69–70 private trade 73–4 protectionism 78–9 see also entries for individual countries Assay Offices 162, 166, 181 Astbury, John 129 Atlantic markets, and new product development 324–5 Au Petit Dunkerque 279 auctions: and marketing of Asian wares 76–7 and metal trades 186 Augusta (trading vessel) 46–7 Axminster carpets 107, 115 Bagnall, Sampson 137 Baltimore 294 Bamford, Samuel 245 Bargum, John Friedrich 189 Barrow, John 105 Basel 78 Bath 209–10, 211, 263, 266 Baudrillard, Jean 29–30 Baumgartner, Lewis 183 Bayley, James 138 Bayreuth, and porcelain industry 80 beauty: and characteristics of 101 and principles of 88–9 Beekman, Gerard 314, 317 Beekman, James 317 Beekman, William 320 Bengal 61, 62 Bentley, Thomas 38, 99 Bentley & Boardman 143, 144 Bentley & White 138 Berlin, and porcelain industry 80, 87, 127 Bernardeau, James 275–6 Betts, Thomas 124 Beverley 210 Bewick, Thomas 277 Bingham, William 312 Birmingham: and buckles 167–8

and economic and commercial expansion 213–14 and factory production 171 and glass industry 122 and housing 224, 225 and invention 178–9 and machinery 177–8 and marketing 182–3 and metal trades 158–61 as tourist attraction 173–5 and middling classes 213, 214–15 and quality control 179–81 and shops in 187–8, 215, 262 and steelmaking 175 and urban growth 211, 212–13 Birmingham Riots (1791) 1, 201 Bisset, James 14, 160–1, 171, 186, 192, 225, 266–7, 326, 327 career of 201–3 and middle-class consumerism 199 on shops 260 and urban life 218–19 Blake, William 133 Blakesly & Sons, J 319 blanc de chine 64 Bombay 69, 76 bone china 128, 131 Boone, George 319 Booth, Enoch 129, 137 Boston 294 Boswell, James 80 bottlemaking 120 Boulsover, Thomas 161–2 Boulton, Matthew 13, 115, 138, 147, 171 and apprentices 173 and buckles 167–8 and Elizabeth Montagu 159 and factory organization 170 and marketing 184, 185–6 and patriotic goods 192 and poaching of labour 172 and quality control 179–81 and retailing 256, 277 and silverware 164–6 and use of European craftsmen 189 and visiting dignitaries 175 Boulton & Co 138 Boulton & Scale 138 Bourdieu, Pierre 29–30 Bow, and porcelain industry 80, 128, 129, 131, 133 Boydell, John 147 Bradbury, Thomas 171, 184–5 brass-founding 167

~ 358 ~

Index and pattern books 187 breakfast 229 Breen, Tim 287, 290, 296, 305, 320 Bremen 78 Brett, Ann 145 Brewer, John 10 Brighton 263 Bristol 217 and creamware 133 and glass industry 121, 122 and housing 224, 225 and middling classes 216 and porcelain industry 132 Britannia, symbolic associations of 9 Britannia metal 176 British Cast Plate Glass Company 122 British fashion, and clothing 302–3 Britishness: and consumer goods 20, 188–90, 280–1, 283, 298, 300, 323–4 and development of 7–8 and marketing of goods 189, 197 Brooks, John 136 buckles 159, 167–8 and American colonies 306–7 and changes in fashion 191 Burdett, Peter Perez 133, 137 Burslem, pottery works in 129 Bushman, Richard L 296, 303 Button Act 181 buttons: and American colonies 306–7 and changes in fashion 191–2 Buxton 210, 263 Byng, John 140 Byzantium 49 Calcutta 69 calicoes: and adaptation to European tastes 52–3 printed 43 and trade barriers against 78–9 and trade with China 49–50 and trade with India 71 Campbell, Colin 270, 281–2 Campbell, Robert 98–9 canals 140, 141, 142, 213 candlesticks 163, 310–11 Canton 46–7, 64, 66 Capo di Monte 127 Carpenter, Elizabeth 262 carpets 115 and encouragement of invention 107 Carr, Annabella 268

Carr, Harriet 268 Carter, James 310 Cary, John 34, 99 and role of shopkeepers 35 catalogues, see trade catalogues Channon, John 114 Chantilly, and porcelain industry 80 Charles I 87 chartered companies, and trade with Asia 69–70 see also East India Companies Cheapside 87, 261 Cheere, Henry 256 Chelsea, and porcelain industry 80, 128, 131 Cheltenham 210, 263 Chesapeake 316 Chester 216, 217, 260 Ch’ien-lung, Emperor 83 China: and decline in trade in manufactured goods 75–6 and early economic development 58–9 and European perceptions of 50–1 and Hong merchants 74–5 and impact of trade with 49, 50 and imports from 24–5, 49–50, 56–7 and intra-Asian trade 59 and large-scale production 49 and modern manufacturing 330 and porcelain trade 72 decline in 75 importance of 75 and production for European markets 64–7 and production processes 61 and trade barriers against 78, 79 and trading voyages to 46–9 china shops 77, 145–6 chinaware 113, 232, 245 chinoiserie: and adaptation of calicoes 52–3 and adaptation of porcelain 52 and Asian adaptation to European markets 68 as dominant style 55 and lacquerware 53–5 and popularity of 49, 51–2 chintz: and Asian adaptation to European markets 68 and Indian production processes 61–2, 64 and popularity of 52–3 Chippendale, Thomas 114, 256, 277 choice 328, 329

~ 359 ~

Index Church and King riots 1, 191 Chusan 66 civility: and shopping 270 as social marker 205 Clarke, John 188 Clay, Henry 82, 109, 138, 178 Clifford, Helen 162 Clifford, John 316 clocks 227 clothing: and British fashion 302–3 and men 243 and middling classes 238–9 coal, and steelmaking 175 cobalt blue 64 Cobden, Richard 155 coffee, and polite behaviour 230 coffee houses 57, 207, 230 Collett, Jonathan 124 Colley, Linda 8 colonies: as markets 282, 324 and trade with 283–6 see also American colonies commerce: and communication of knowledge 105 and luxury goods 31–3 and praise of 6 commercialization: and consumer goods 23 and luxury goods 44 Compagnie de la Chine 69 Compagnie des Indes Orientales 69 Compagnie Perpetuelle des Indes 69 Condé, Duc de 81 Confucius 51 consumer culture 5 consumer goods: and aesthetics 88–9 and attributes of 26 and British identity of 20, 188–90, 197, 280–1, 283, 298, 300, 323–4 and changed nature of 3–4 and characteristics of 85 and development of 113 and domestic life 115 and economic change 22–3, 27–8 and fashion 196–7, 247–8, 254–5 and gender 196, 204 and gentility 115 and global economy 7 and global success of 279, 282–3, 324–5 and historians’ disregard of 12–13

and historical writing on 26–7 and modernity of 26 and national identity 7–8, 19, 20, 280–1 and national power 87–8 and national project to produce quality 92–6 and nineteenth century 328–9 and novelty of 23–4, 44, 86, 87, 281 and perceptions of 21 and power issues 330 and product revolution 6 and significance of 13–14, 25 and trade 12 and transatlantic consumer culture 324–5 and variety 86–7 and wider ownership of 4–5, 10 see also entries for individual goods; middling classes, possessions of consumer revolution 5–6, 9 and economic growth 27 and historians’ disregard of goods 12–13 and historical debate over 10–11 and theoretical framework of 9–10 and trade 12 consumer society 329 and global nature of 329–30 and modern 331 consumers: and contemporary descriptions of 35 and gender 234–46 and middling classes as 35, 195, 196, 203–4 urban setting of 217–18 and producing goods to satisfy 99–100 consumption: conspicuous 206 and gender: men 242–6 women 234–42 and industrialization 27–8 and learning of 195 as marker of inclusion 11 and production 16, 329 Cookworthy, William 133 Cooper & Glover 139 copyright 109 Coromandel coast 62, 68 cotton industry 115–16 and development of European 83 and growth of 79 cotton trade 55 and Asia 57 court society: and luxury goods 37–9 and patronage of porcelain factories 87–8

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Index Covent Garden 207, 261 Cowper, Lady 124 Cox, James 128, 148 creamware 81, 83, 100, 110, 132–3 and American colonies 309 and innovation 133 creativity, and invention 89 crime, and shops 269 Crisp, Nicholas 128 Croker, Rev Temple Henry 100 curtains 113 da Gama, Vasco 24 Darley, Mathias 137 Darling, William 139 Davis, Ralph 286 Dawson, Isabella 240–1 Dawson, William 139 De Certeau, Michel 199–200, 266 De Vries, Jan 11, 28, 235–6 Dearman, Richard 319 Defoe, Daniel 22, 195, 263 and American colonies 296 and changing fashions 253 and consumer goods 34 on consumers 35 and impact of trade 31–2 and shopping 268 Delft, and porcelain industry 80 delftware 80, 109 Denmark, and trade with Asia 69 Derby Works 80 and creamware 133 and porcelain industry 110, 128, 131 Deshima 67 design: and anti-French strategy 190 and assimilation of Oriental 52 and design studios 96 and French prominence 93, 94 and manufacturing 94, 96 and metals and metalware 163, 166–7, 190 and need for improvement in 94–5 and print trade 98 and promotion of 95 and silverware 163, 166–7 and training of designers 97–8 and use of European craftsmen 189 Devonshire, Duchess of 196 Devonshire Rees & Loyd 317 Dickin, Charles 139 dictionaries: and communication of knowledge 105–6 and promotion of invention 101

Diderot, Denis 302–3 on invention 89 Diderot effect 306 distribution: and ceramics industry 139–42 and glass industry 122–3 and metal trades 182 division of labour 6 Adam Smith on 33 and Chinese porcelain production 64, 67 and manufacturing 98–9 and metal trades 169–70, 173–4, 177 and subcontracting 169 domestic furnishings 39, 40–1 see also furniture domestic goods: and changed nature of 3–4 and range of 113 domestic life, and consumer goods 115 Dossie, Robert 94, 95, 103 and encyclopaedias 106 Douglas, Mary 29, 256, 329, 330–1 drawing: and doubtful impact of 104 and encouragement of 102–4 and importance of 102 and improving skills in 98 and role of 102 Dresden, and porcelain industry 126 Dundee 212 Dunkerley & Cockings 275, 277 Durnall, Edward 187–8 Dutch East India Company 68, 69 and marketing of Asian wares 76 and textile trade 70 Earl of Elgin (trading vessel) 47, 74 earthenware 126 and concentration of production 129 and decorating of 133–4 and distribution 139–42 and fashion 254 and markets for: American colonies 308–9 domestic 141–2 expansion of 130, 132, 150–2 international 143–5 and networking 137–9 and product innovation 109–10 and retailing 145–8 Wedgwood’s pricing policy 148–9 and stoneware 132 and transfer printing 136–7 and wages 134, 135

~ 361 ~

Index earthenware (cont.): see also creamware; porcelain; pottery industry East, see Asia; entries for individual countries East India Companies 20, 49 and marketing of Asian wares 76–7 and opening of Asia trade 69–70 and private trade 73–4 and trade with Asia 72–3 see also Dutch East India Company; English East India Company eating and drinking: and American colonies 305–6 and breakfast 229 and dinner 227–9 and tea drinking 57, 150, 230–2 Ebbinghaus, John Herman 189 economic change, and consumer goods 22–3, 26–8 economic development, Anglo-French comparison 91–2 ‘economy of quality’ 20, 27 Eddis, William 304 Eden Treaty (1786) 92, 130 Edge, John 138 Edinburgh 211, 213 and housing 225 Edwards, George 137 Elers Brothers 129 Elias, Norbert 301–2 and court society 38 elites 205 and incomes of 207 and London 208–9 Elizabeth I 38 Elliott, John 324 Elliott and Sons 171 empire: and colonial trade 283–6 and colonies as markets 282 and national identity 8 and trade 93 see also American colonies Encyclopaedia Britannica 100 encyclopaedias: and communication of knowledge 105–6 and promotion of invention 101 Encyclopédistes 51 English East India Company 62, 68, 265 and chintz 52–3 and marketing of Asian wares 76, 77 and porcelain trade 56, 73, 79, 130 and private trade 74 and textile trade 70–1

engravings: and communication of knowledge 101–2 as design tool 98 and trade catalogues 322–3 and transfer printing 136, 137 see also trade cards Epsom 210 Estabrook, Carl 225 Etruria 129 Exeter 216 exports: and American colonies 283–6, 289, 306–14 categories of goods 287–8 mercantile practice 314–20 and representation of values 288–9 and growth of 282–3 factory production: and factory tours 173–5 and metal trades 170–1 faience 80 fairs, and shopping 258–9 Farmer, Joseph 137 Farquharson, Elizabeth 239 fashion: and advertising 197 and consumer goods 196–7, 247–8, 254–5 and definition of 249 and imitation 251 and novelty 250–1 and the senses 249–50 and design change 96, 253–4 and desirability of objects 36–7 and earthenware 254 and expanded role of 41–2 as an experience 257 and fashion cycles 252–4, 255 and glass industry 254 and imitation 251 and innovation 43 and international demand 281 and lifestyle 257 and luxury 42 and metalware 158, 166–7, 191–2 and middling classes 6, 42 and politeness 41 and product cycles 252–4, 255 and role of retailers 255–6 and significance of 247–8 and social emulation 251–2 and toymakers 158 and trade 314–15 trade catalogues 197

~ 362 ~

Index and upholders 256 and variety 86 Faster, Thomas 319 Fenton, Creswick & Company 163 Ferguson, Adam, on luxury 33 Fiennes, Celia 210 Finn, Margot 243 Fisher, Jack 261 Fisher, Samuel Rowland 318–19, 322–3 fitness, as principle of beauty 88, 101 Fitzgerald, Francis 104 Flaxman, William 133 Fleet Street 261 Fletcher & Tittensor 139 Florence, and porcelain industry 80, 87 Folgham, John 139 Fothergill, John 165–6, 184 France: and colonies 324 as competitor 93 and consumer goods production 91–2 and design: design studios 96 prominence in 93, 94 training of designers 97–8 and imitation of British goods 189–90 and porcelain industry 127 and protectionism 78, 190–1 and trade with Asia 69 François I 41 Frankfurt 78 Franklin, Benjamin 14, 243, 291 and demand for British goods 293 on imports 298 and lack of manufacturing 294 Frederick II (the Great) 127 Frye, Thomas 128 Fulton, James 225 furnishings 39 and innovations in 44 furniture: and American colonies 311–13 and growth in demand for 113–14 Galton, Samuel 1 Garbett, Samuel 213 Gardiner, Nancy 232 Gay, John vii 234–5, 261 Gee, Joshua 296 gender: and clothing possessions 238–9 and consumer goods 196, 204 and dining 228 and household behaviour 235–6

and male consumers 242–6 and possessions 237–8 personalization of 242 silverware 241–2 women’s bequests of 239–41 and women as consumers 203–4, 234–7, 245 Geneva 78 Genn, Grace 240, 241 gentility: and consumer goods 115 and luxury goods 6 as social marker 205 and teaware 163 gentry: and incomes of 207 in London 208–9 Gerard, Alexander, and principles of beauty 88, 89 Germany: and marketing of British goods 191 and porcelain industry 126–7 and Wedgwood 143 Gilboy, Elizabeth 26–7 Giles, James 134 Gillows furniture makers 114, 256 Gilpin, Joshua 319 Glasgow: and housing 225 and urban growth 211–12, 213 glass industry 113 and bottlemaking 120 and cut glass 124–5 and development of European industry 119 and distribution 122–3 and fashion 254 and international markets 123 and invention of flint glass 119 and lead glass 124 and London as marketing centre 122–3 and price of glassware 125–6 and range of products 124 and retailing 123–4 and structure of 120, 121–2 and survey of 120 and taxation 123 and use of coal-fired furnaces 119–20 Venetian 117–19 and workforce of 120 Glass Sellers’ Company 121, 122–3 global economy 7, 11–12, 331 Gloucester 217 Goldin, Claudia 289–90

~ 363 ~

Index goldsmiths 168–9 and quality control 181 and subcontracting 170 Goldsmiths Hall 162 Goldthwaite, Richard, and taste 39 Gonzaga, Cardinal 50 Goodes, William 188 Great Exhibition (1851) 328 Greatbatch, William 129, 138 Greaves, William 138 Gregg, Robert 317 Gujarat 61–2, 71 Guppy and Armstrong 319 Gutteridge, Joseph 267 Hackwood, Alan 133 Hadley, Benjamin 323 Hague, Thomas 184 Halfpenny, John 47 Halfpenny, William 47 Hall, Charles 47 Hall, John 129 Hall, Thomas 73 Hall, William 105 hallmarking 162, 181 Hamburg 78 Hamilton, Alexander 297 Hammett, Charlotte 144–5 Hancock, Robert 136 Hancock & Shepherd 138 Hanway, Jonas 150, 231 hardwaremen 170, 182 Hardy, Julius 232 Harrison, William 118 Harrogate 210 Hartley, Green & Co 133 Henry VIII 41 Hepplewhite, George 114 Herculaneum Pottery 129, 137 Herodotus 154 Hickey, Thomas 84 Hickey, William 47 Hickin Glass Business 122 Hirado Island 69, 72 historiography: and industrialization 27–8 and luxury goods 26–7, 37–9 Hogarth, William 231, 252 and principles of beauty 88–9 on variety 86 Holland 78 and luxury goods 27 and trade with Asia 69 Holland, William 244

Holt, Dorothy 103 Honeybone, Robert 138 Hong merchants 74 Hoskings & Oliver 139 housing, and middling classes 224–5 Howlett, George 171 Hoyland, John 318 Hull 212 Hume, David 8 and division of the arts 99 on luxury 6 on luxury and commerce 33 and national identity 301 Humphrey, Ozias 103 Huntsman, Benjamin 175 Hutton, Catherine 227–8, 232, 262 Hutton, William 183, 233–4 and career of 200–1 on London’s shops 262 and middle-class consumerism 199 Hyde, Nathan 320 Hyde, Robert 320 Imari ware 67, 72 imitation: and Asian adaptation to European markets 68 of Asian goods 20, 50 lacquerware 81–2 porcelain industry 80–1 and concept of 23 and fashion 251 and innovation 81–2 and invention 89, 105–10 and patenting 109 as principle of beauty 88, 89 and product innovation 106 and role of 45 import-substitution, and tariff barriers 79 incomes 3, 10 and the gentry 207 and middling classes 207, 208, 224 India: and imports from 24–5, 52–3 and production for European markets 62–4 and production processes 61–2 and textile trade 70–1 industrial enlightenment 106, 268 industrial revolution 328 and narrow technological definition of 92 industrialization: and colonial trade 286 and consumer goods 22–3, 27 and consumption 27–8

~ 364 ~

Index and origins of 327–8 ‘industrious revolution’ 235–6 inequality, and luxury 327 innovation: and consumer goods 44 and fashion 43 and imitation 81–2 see also invention; process innovation; product innovation invention 82 and commercialization of luxury 23 and consumer goods 86 and encouragement of 95–6, 101 and imitation 89, 105–10 and metal trades 178–9 and new materials 24 and patents 107–9 see also innovation; process innovation; product innovation iron, and innovation 43 ironmongers 170 Isherwood, Baron 329, 330–1 Italy: and marketing of British goods 191 and silk production 49 Jackson, William 3 Jacquelin, Martha 307 James Wilson & Co 139 Japan: and early economic development 59–60 and imports from 24–5 lacquerware 53 and porcelain trade 72 and production for European markets 67 and production processes 62 japanned ware 55, 107 and imitation of Asian goods 81–2 Jaucourt, M Chevalier de 42, 248 Jee, Eginton & Company 323 Jefferson, Thomas 299 Jenks, John 319 Jingdezhen 61, 64 Johnson, Jerome 124 Johnson, Joshua 318 Johnson, Samuel 80, 120 and advertising 272–3 Jones, Colin 324 Jones, Thomas 109 Jones & Wister 317 Kakiemon ware 72 Kenrick, William 100 Khan, B Zorina 289–90

Kidd, Colin 300 Kidderminster carpets 115 Klein, Naomi 11 knowledge: and communication of 101–2 and shopping 267–8 La Charité 189–90 labour force: and glass industry 120 and metal trades 171–3 and pottery industry 82–3, 130 and prohibitions on migration 189 lacquerware: and development of European industry 81–2 and Japanese production processes 62 and tariffs on 79 and trade with Asia 53–5, 56 and trade with China 49–50 Langford, Paul 209 Lanza, Francesco 328 Lausanne 78 Law, John 69 Leeds, and urban growth 211 Leeds Pottery, and creamware 133 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 51 Leicester 212 Lemire, Beverley 313 Lennox, Lady Caroline 196 Lichfield 210 lifestyle, and fashion 257 lighting 114–15 and cut glass chandeliers 124 Lightoler, Thomas 47 Linnell, John 114, 256 Liverpool: and housing 224 and urban growth 211 livery companies 207, 261 Lloyd, Nemiah and Sampson 319 Lock, Matthias 103 London: and glass industry 121, 122 and impact of high-income families 208–9 and middling classes 208, 209 and role of 93 and shops in 13–14, 157, 261–2, 264 Longton Hall Works 132, 137 Loome, Sarah 239 Louis XIV 38 Louis XV 38, 55 Lowe, Thomas 138 Lowestoft, and porcelain industry 128, 132

~ 365 ~

Index Ludlow 210, 260 luxury and luxury goods: and American colonies 297–8, 299–300 and changed perceptions of 21, 32, 37, 44 and contemporary thought on 31–7 and cultural role of 29–31 as economic benefit 22 and historical writing on 26–7, 37–9 and inequality 327 and misgivings over 326–7 and significance of 21 and wider ownership of 4–5 Lyme Regis 210 Lynes, Elizabeth 15, 239, 241 Lyons, Peter 306, 309 Macartney, Viscount 83, 144 machinery: and metal trades 177–8 and prohibitions on export of 189 Madras 69, 76 maiolica 80, 118 majolica 80 Malkin pottery 137 Malthus, Thomas 26, 284, 291 Manchester: and housing 224 and urban growth 211 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 106 Mandeville, Bernard 233, 301, 319 and benefits of luxuries 22, 32 and luxury goods 33 Manila 59 manufacturing: and the arts 88, 91–3, 95, 96, 98–9 and design 96 and division of labour 98–9 and growth of 93 and industrial organization 168–71 and luxury goods 6 and variety 87 Margate 210 marketing: and Asian trade 70–2 and Asian wares 76–7 and British identity of goods 188–90, 197 and ceramics industry 145–8 and glassware 122–3 and metal trades 182–5 see also advertising; retailing markets: evolution of 19–20 and shopping 258–9

Marks, Joseph 15, 225, 232 Marquis de Prié (trading vessel) 47 Marshall, Alfred, and Anglo-French comparison 91–2 mass consumption 329 mass culture 329 Massie, Joseph 207 materials: and metal trades 175–7 and novelty of 24 Matlock 210 May, Eleanor 239 Maydwell & Windle 124 Mayhew & Ince 114 McCracken, Grant 303 McKendrick, Neil 9, 151–2, 203–4, 206, 235, 248, 270–1 mechanization 6 Meir, Richard 138 Meir, Sarah 138 Meissen factory 80, 87, 126 Melon, J–F 32, 33 men: and clothing 243 as consumers 242–6 Mesopotamia 155 metals and metalware: and advertising 185–8 and attraction of 158 and Birmingham 158–61 and brass-founding 167 and British identity of 188–90 and British industrial identity 155 and buckles 167–8 and consumer goods: as characteristic British products 157 growth in demand for 156–7 variety of 158, 166 and design 163, 166–7, 190 and division of labour 169–70, 173–4, 177 in early material cultures 154–5 and factory production 170–1 and factory tours 173–5 and fashion 158, 166–7, 191–2, 254–5 and goldsmiths 168–9 and industrial organization 168–71 and invention 178–9 and machinery 177–8 prohibitions on export of 189 and marketing 182–5 and advertising 185–7 and shops 187–8 and materials 175–7

~ 366 ~

Index and metalworking 155 and national power 155 and prices of 185 and quality control 179–82 and Sheffield 161–2 and silverware: diversification of output 162 and Matthew Boulton 164–6 silver plate 161–2, 163, 166–7 and subcontracting 168, 169, 170 and tableware 162–3 and teaware 163–4 and workforce of 171–3 and worldwide use of 155–6 Middleton, Erasmus 100, 105 middling classes: and characteristics of 195–6 and consumer goods 280 embrace of 15, 20 preoccupation with 19 social significance of 205–6 as consumers 35, 195, 196, 203–4 urban setting of 217–18 and eating and drinking 227–9 and fashion 6, 42 and housing 224–5 and incomes of 207, 208, 224 and London 208, 209 as market leaders 86–7 and modernity 26 and politeness 233–4 and possessions of 219 chinaware 232 clocks and watches 227 clothing 238–9 cutlery 228 dining room 228, 229 domestic setting of 224–5 gender differences 237–8 insurance of 225–6 personalization of 242 politeness 234 probate inventories 219, 222–3 regional variations 220–1 self-presentation/identity 226–7 silverware 241–2 social status 219–20 tea drinking 230–2, 241 tradesmen 220 women’s bequests of 239–41 and property 215 and shopping 36, 195 and size of 208 and tableware 162–3

and teaware 163 and towns 208, 216–17 industrial towns 212–16 London 208, 209 and provincial urban growth 211–12 regional centres 211 small towns 216 spa towns 209–11 Millar, John 36 Ming dynasty (1368–1644) 59 mirrors 114, 115, 313–14 mistresses 6–7, 39 modelling: and ceramics industry 133 and improving skills in 98 modernity, and consumer goods 26 Mokyr, Joel 106 Montagu, Elizabeth 15 and Matthew Boulton 159, 176–7 and ‘right use of luxury’ 40 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 143 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat on commerce 6, 22 and luxury 32 moral reform, and consumer goods 7 Moritz, Carl Philip 264 Morris, Robert 47 Morris, William 328 Morton, Richard 166 Motteux, John 183 Mountford, Ralph 138 muslins 43 Nagasaki 67, 69 Nankeen ware 2 Naples 191 and porcelain industry 80, 87 Napoleonic Wars, impact of 191–2 national identity 7–8, 300–1 and consumer goods 7–8, 19, 20, 280–1 and ‘manners’ 301–2 national power, and consumer goods 87–8 Navigation Laws, and colonial trade 290 Nef, John U 26, 27 Neptune (trading vessel) 74 networking: and manufacturing 171 and pottery industry 137–9 Neuchatel 78 New York 294, 313 Newcastle: and glass industry 121, 122 and housing 224 and urban growth 212

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Index newspapers: and advertising 271–2 in American colonies 320–2 in American colonies 294–5 Nicholas, Robert 306 North American colonies, see American colonies Norton, George F 297–8 Norton, John Hatley 297, 304, 307, 309, 310 Norwich 217 Nottingham 212 and housing 224 novelty: and consumer goods 23–4, 44, 86, 87, 281 and fashion 250–1, 256 and metalware 166 and significance of 21 and trade 284 Nowill, Thomas 184 Nowill & Hague 184 O’Neil, James 245 ormolu 176–7 ornamental goods, and trade with China 50 ornamental ware 113 see also metals and metalware Ostende Company 69, 73 Ottoman Empire 76 Overton, Mark 220, 222 Owen, Thomas 320 Page, Mann 306–7, 310 Pall Mall 146, 186, 261 Palmer and Neale 148 Palmer’s 138 Papendiek, Mrs 151 paper, and encouragement of invention 106–7 Paris, and porcelain industry 80, 87 Parival, Jean-Nicholas 34 Parker and Wakelin 170 Parker’s glass cutters 124 Parkes, Samuel 138 Parrett, Samuel 232 patents: as advertising 179 and ceramics 131 and consumer orientation of 108–9, 178–9 and imitation 109 and opposition to 95 and understatement of invention 107–8, 178 patina, and distinction 205–6 patriotism, and consumer goods 191–2 pattern books, and advertising 186–7, 277–8 pearlware, and American colonies 309

Pearson, Joseph 138 pedlars, and shopping 258, 259 Pegg, William 326–7 Pennsylvania 295, 313 Pepys, Samuel 274 Philadelphia 294, 309, 310, 315, 317 Piccadilly 261 Pickering, John 178 pinchbeck 176, 178 Pinkey Chougua 46, 74 Place, Francis 226–7, 245, 264, 267 Plumstead, Thomas 319 Plymouth, and porcelain industry 128 politeness 232–3 and fashion 41 and middling classes 233–4 and shopping 270 as social marker 205 and tea drinking 230 poor rates, and middling classes 208 populuxe goods 25 porcelain: and adaptation to European tastes 52 and Asia: decline in trade 75 trade with 71–2, 130 and bone china 128, 131 and China: importance of imports from 75 production for European markets 64–7 production processes 61 trade with 49–50, 56–7, 72 and decorating of 129–30, 133–4 and development of European industry 80 and distribution 139–42 and entrepreneurs 128–9 and European royal factories 126–7 and Japan: production for European markets 67 trade with 72 and markets for 127–8, 129–30 domestic 141–2 expansion of 150–2 international 143–5 and national power 87–8 and protective tariffs 130 and retailing 145–8 Wedgwood’s pricing policy 148–9 and semi/luxury markets for 71–2 and transfer printing 136–7 and use of new ingredients 131–2 see also earthenware; pottery industry Portugal, and trade with Asia 69 Postlethwayt, Malachy 34

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Index on consumers 35, 99–100 on fairs 258 and importance of drawing 102 and improvement of commodities 105 pottery industry: and distribution 139–42 and domestic development of 43, 80 and expansion of 130 and markets for: domestic 141–2 expansion of 150–2 international 143–5 and networking within 137–9 and retailing 145–8 Wedgwood’s pricing policy 148–9 and workforce of 82–3, 130 Powell, Samuel 319–20 Priestley, Joseph 326 attack on home of 1 inventory of possessions 1–3, 4 Priestley, Mary 1 print culture: and American colonies 294–5 and communication of knowledge 105–6 and expansion of 102 see also newspapers; trade cards printing industry: and design 98 and textiles 79 private trade, and Asian goods 73–4, 76–7 probate inventories 219, 222–3 process innovation 86, 110 product cycles, and fashion 252–4, 255 product innovation 23, 44–5, 85–6 and advertising 270 and consumer goods 86 and imitation 106 and invention 95–6 product revolution 6 and extent of 6–7 and global economy 7 property, and middling classes 215 protectionism 92 and Asian goods 78–9 and French prohibitions on British imports 190–1 and luxury expenditure 29 and porcelain industry 130 and sumptuary laws 29 Punjab 61 Puritanism, and American colonies 296 Pye, John 147 quality control, and metal trades 162, 179–82

Ramsay, Allan 252 Rathell, Catherine 304, 310–11 Ravenhead, and glass industry 122 Ravenscroft, George 109, 119 Rawlinson, Sarah 4 Redrich, Robert 109 Reed and Wainwright glassworks 121–2 Reeves, John 187 Renaissance, and Venetian glass 117–19 retailing 197 and ceramics industry 145–8 Wedgwood’s pricing policy 148–9 and china shops 77, 145–6 and fairs 258–9 and fashion-making 255–6 and glass 123–4 and metal trades 170, 186, 187–8 and pedlars 259 and variety 86–7 see also advertising; marketing; shopping and shops Reynell, John 315, 317 Reynolds, Joshua, and principles of beauty 88, 89 Reynolds, William 307, 310 Richardson, Samuel 211 Ridgeway, Dorothy 15, 241 Right of Genius, Act of the (1793) 109 roads 140, 141 Robinson, Eric 159 Robinson & Smith 139 Roche, Daniel 249 Roche, Sophie von la 264 Rolfe, William 319 Rollason, Mary 145–6 Rolt, Richard 105 Royal Academy of Arts 104 Royal Exchange 263, 265 Rylands, William 201 Sadler, John 136 Sadler & Green 13, 136–7, 139, 143, 147 Said, Edward 50 Saint-Gobian glassworks 119 salon culture, and luxury goods 37, 39–40 Samuel Pemberton & Son 138 satire, and tea drinking 230–1 Saudray, Charles de 190 Savary, Jacques 31 Sayer, Robert 137 Schopenhauer, Johanna 263 Schumpeter, Elizabeth 287 Scitovsky, Tibor 250 Scott, Sarah 40

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Index senses, and luxury goods 37 servants, and consumption 235 Seven Years War 282, 283, 299 Sèvres, and porcelain industry 80, 87, 127 sexuality, and luxury 37–8, 234–5 Shackleton, Elizabeth 237, 241, 243 Shammas, Carole 222, 290 Sheffield: and machinery 177–8 and marketing 182–3, 184 and metal trades 161–2 and middling classes 214–15 and silversmithing 172 and steelmaking 175 and urban growth 211 Sheffield, Lord 312 Shelburne, Earl of 173–4, 295 Shelburne, Lady 174–5 Sheraton, Thomas 256, 278 Sherwin, Will 79 Shipley, William 95, 102–3 shopkeepers 35, 36, 217, 270 American 314, 315–16, 320 shoplifting 269 shopping and shops 259–60 and auctions 265 in Birmingham 187–8, 215, 262 and china 77, 145–6 and civility 270 and consumer responsiveness 266 and crime 269 and display of goods 263–4 as education 264 and factory tours 174 and fairs 258–9 and glassware 123–4 and knowledge-based shopping 267–8 and London 13–14, 157, 261–2, 264 and markets 258–9 and memorability of shopping 266–7 and men 243–5 and metal trades 187 and middling classes 195 and motivations for shopping 267 and number of shops 260 and pedlars 258, 259 and politeness 270 and sociability 36, 266, 268–9 and spa towns 263, 266 and tourism 263, 264 in towns 217 and variety of shops 260, 262 and warehouse selling 265–6 see also retailing

Short, Dr Thomas 230 Shrewsbury 216 silk, and Asian trade 49 Silk Route 49 silverware: and design 163, 166–7 and diversification of output 162 and Matthew Boulton 164–6 and quality control 162, 181 and Sheffield 172 and silver plate 161–2, 163, 166–7 and subcontracting 169 and teaware 163–4 and women 241–2 Simmel, Georg 42, 206, 235, 251 Simon, Edward 319 Simpson, Thomas 137 Skidmore, John 178–9 Smiles, Samuel 155 Smith, Adam 8, 14, 324 and consumption and production 16, 327 and definition of luxury 33–4 and desirability of objects 36–7 and division of labour 33 and empire as source of customers 197 on fascination with trinkets and toys 21–2 and fashion 252 and imitation 20, 89, 157 on passion for possessions 157 and principles of beauty 88 and shopping 267 Smith, William 138 smuggling 190–1, 283 sociability: and luxury goods 35–6 and shopping 36, 266, 268–9 and tea drinking 230, 232 Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, see Society of Arts Society of Arts: and campaign on drawing 102–3 and encouragement of invention 95–6, 101, 106–7 Soho Works 15, 169, 170 and pattern books 187 as tourist attraction 173, 174 Sokoloff, Kenneth 289–90 Sombart, Werner 26 and fashion 249 and luxury and sexuality 37–8, 235 and women and luxury 39 Song-Yuan dynasty (960–1368) 58

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Index spa towns: and middling classes 209–11 and shopping in 263, 266 Spain, and protectionism 78 Spice Islands 69 Spitalfields 40, 158, 247 Spode, Josiah 129 Sprimont, Nicholas 128 Staffordshire: and craftsmen’s wages 135 and creamware 81, 132, 133 and earthenware production 129 and porcelain industry 80, 110, 128, 132 and pottery industry 82–3 Stalker, John 81 Stamford 210, 260 Stamp Act (1765) 299 standard of living 9–10 Stansbury, Joseph 322 steel, and metal trades 175 Steele, Richard 207 Steuart, Sir James, and benefits of luxuries 32 Stockport 212 stoneware 132 Stourbridge, and glass industry 121 Stourbridge Fair 259 Stretser, Thomas 231 Sturbich Fair 125 Stuyvesant, Peter 317 Styles, John 6 subcontracting, and metal trades 168, 169, 170 sugar 21 Sugar Act (1764) 299 sumptuary laws 24, 28–9 and disappearance of 32 and purpose of 25 supercargoes, and Asian trade 46, 74 Surat 69 Swansea, and creamware 133 Sweden, and trade with Asia 69 Swedish East India Company 71 tableware 162–3 and American colonies 307 tariffs, and Asian trade 78–9 taste: and consumer goods 43, 88 and luxury goods 39 and rejection of principles of 328 and salon culture 40 and the senses 249 as social marker 205 and upholders 256

taxation: and American colonies 299 and glass industry 123 Taylor, John 167, 169, 184 and employment of women 173 Taylor, Thomas 138 Taylor, William 15 tea and tea-drinking 21 and American colonies 305–6 and demand for ceramics 43, 150 and middling classes 230, 231–2, 241 and polite behaviour 230 and popularity of 57, 150 and satires of 230–1 and sociability 230, 232 and tea sets 153 and trade with China 47, 57 teaware 163–4, 309–10 technical innovation 44 Tehua 64 textiles: and decline in woolen exports 93 and development of European industry 83 and encouragement of invention 107 and fashion 253–4 and India: production for European markets 62–4 production processes 61–2 trade with 70–1 and protectionism 78 and semi/luxury markets for 71 and trade with Asia 56 Thomason, Edward 14, 178, 192, 276–7 Thrift, Nigel 267–8 timekeeping 227 Tokugawa shogunate 59 Torriano, Nathaniel 46–7 and private trade 74 Torrington, Viscount 274 tourism: and factory tours 173–5 and shopping 263, 264 towns, and middling classes 208, 216–17 and industrial towns 212–16 and provincial urban growth 211–12 and regional centres 211 and shops 217 and small towns 216 and spa towns 209–11 Townsend & Crossley 170 Townshend Acts (1767) 299 toymakers 14 and fashion 158

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Index trade: and American colonies 283–6, 289, 306–14 categories of goods 287–8 mercantile practice 314–20 and representation of values 288–9 with Asia 49–57 decline in manufactured goods 75–6 and marketing 70–2 mechanics of 72–5 opening of 69–70 private trade 73–4 production for European markets 62–7 and protectionism 78–9 and China 24–5, 49–50, 56–7, 78, 79 intra-Asian 59 and colonies 93, 283–6 and consumer revolution 12 and gentility 207 and growth of exports 282–3 and India 24–5, 52–3 and Japan 24–5, 53, 62, 67, 72 and luxury goods 28–9, 31–3 and marketing of Asian wares 76–7 and Navigation Laws 290 and provision of variety 284 trade cards 186, 197, 272–7 trade catalogues: and advertising 277–8 in American colonies 322–3 and fashion 197 and retailing 147–8, 186–7 transfer printing, and ceramics industry 136–7 transport, see distribution Trumball, Josiah 319 Tucker, Josiah 34, 178 on consumers 35 and display of wealth 195 Tunbridge Wells 210 Turner, William 138 Tyneside, and steelmaking 175 Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure 4–5, 100, 101 upholders 256 upholstery 113, 312, 313 urban society: and American colonies 293–4 and luxury 42–3 and middling classes 208, 216–17 consumption 217–18 industrial towns 212–16 London 208, 209 regional centres 211

small towns 216 spa towns 209–11 and provincial urban growth 211–12 useful knowledge 106, 268 variety: and consumers’ aspiration for 86–7 and marketing of 87 and trade 284 varnishes, and encouragement of invention 106, 107 Veblen, Thorstein 206, 235, 249 Venetian glass 117–19 Verzelini (Venetian glassworker) 119 Vicenza, and porcelain industry 80, 87 Vickery, Amanda 237, 243, 266 Vienna, and porcelain industry 80, 87 Vigne, Neave, Winscote & Walker 121 Voltaire 51 Vulliamy, Benjamin 169 W W & Startins 319 wages: in metal trades 173 and pottery industry 134, 135 wallpaper 115 Walsh, Claire 268 Warburton, Joseph 137, 138 Warder, John 319 Warner, Thomas 138 Warner and Cooke 182 Warrington 212 Warwick 210 Washington, George 310 watches 227 Watkins, Thomas 319 Wayles, John 299 Weatherill, Lorna 162, 219, 222, 237 Wedges, Thomas 319 Wedgwood, John 129, 137, 138, 142–3, 149 Wedgwood, Josiah 13, 83, 99, 109, 129 and commercial networking 137–9 and creamware 81, 132–3 and fashion 254 and innovation 43 and international markets 143–5, 314 and porcelain 133 and pricing policies 148–9 and retailing 146–8, 256, 265 and trade catalogues 187, 277 on unpopularity of gold 153 Wedgwood, Thomas 129, 137, 138 Welch Wilkinson 319 Wells, Elizabeth 230

~ 372 ~

Index West Indies: and British perceptions of 295 and dependence of 296 and emigration to 291 and exports to 284–6 West Pans, and porcelain industry 131, 132 Westwood, Obadiah 179 Wheeley, James 275 Whieldon, Thomas 129 Whitechapel 209 Whitehead, James 323 Whittle, Jane 220 Whitty, Thomas 107 Whitworth & Company 138 Wicksteed, Philip 328 Wilcox, Catherine 136 Wilkinson, Thomas 319 Williamsburg 294, 304 Willie, John 149 Wilson, William 319 Withers, Mary 242 Wolverhampton 212 women: as china dealers 145–6 as consumers 203–4, 234–7, 242, 245

and luxury goods 39 in metal trades 173 and possessions of 237–8 bequests of 239–41 clothing 238–9 personalization of 242 silverware 241–2 and salon culture 39 and shopping 268–9 and work opportunities 236 Wood, Aaron 129 Wood, Jesse 138 Wood, John 138 Wood, Ralph 138 Wood, William 138 Woodeford, Rev James 244, 246 woolens, decline in exports 93 Worcester, and porcelain industry 80, 110, 128, 129, 132 Wordsworth, Dorothy 213 Wright, Joseph 133 Wythe, George 310 York 211, 216

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