Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830

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Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830 Edited by

Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-11

Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830

10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan



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Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan



Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830

Selection, editorial matter and Introduction © Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-00705-5 ISBN-10: 0-230-00705-8

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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women and material culture, 1660-1830/edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-00705-5 (cloth) ISBN-10: 0-230-00705-8 (cloth) 1. Women–Social conditions–Europe. 2. Women consumers–Europe–History. 3. Material culture–Europe–History. 4. Material culture in literature. I. Batchelor, Jennie, 1976- II. Kaplan, Cora. HQ1587.W627 2007 305.4094⬘0903–dc22 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



Individual chapters © contributors 2007

List of Figures

vii

Notes on the Contributors

ix

Acknowledgements

xii

Introduction Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan

1

Part I: Dress and Adornment

9

1.

Women and their Jewels Marcia Pointon

2.

Fanny’s Pockets: Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy, 1780–1850 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White

31

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

52

3.

11

Part II: Women and Sculpture 4.

5.

6.

69

Sculpting in Tiaras: Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts Rosalind P. Blakesley

71

Pride and Prejudice: Eighteenth-century Women Sculptors and their Material Practices Marjan Sterckx

86

A Female Sculptor and Connoisseur: Artistic Self-fashioning and the Exposure of Connoisseurship, Collecting and Concupiscence Angela Escott

Part III: The Material Culture of Empire 7.

‘The Taste for Bringing the Outside in’: Nationalism, Gender and Landscape Wallpaper (1700–1825) Ellen Kennedy Johnson

103

117 119

v



Contents

Contents

8.

Taihu Tatlers: Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade David Porter

134

9.

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

148

Part IV: Women and Books

161

10.

Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’ Jennie Batchelor

163

11.

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

176

‘Books without which I cannot write’: How Did Eighteenth-century Women Writers Get the Books They Read? Susan Staves

192

12.

Select Bibliography

213

Index

217



vi

Figure 1. Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4. Figure 5. Figure 6. Figure 7. Figure 8. Figure 9. Figure 10. Figure 11. Figure 12. Figure 13. Figure 14. Figure 15. Figure 16. Figure 17. Figure 18. Figure 19. Figure 20. Figure 21. Figure 22. Figure 23. Figure 24.

Joseph Highmore (1692–1780), Mrs. Sharpe and her Child (a) and (b) English mourning ring (1791) Chatelaine, gold with enamel decoration, mid-eighteenth century William Hogarth, Piquet or Virtue in Danger ( The Lady’s Last Stake) (1758–9) After Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough (c. 1700) Queen Charlotte, engraved by Henry Meyer and published by Henry Colburn (1818) A white cotton corded dimity pocket belonging to Fanny Jarvis Fanny Jarvis’s marks on her pocket E. F. Burney, ‘The Waltz’ (c. 1815) Linen pockets bearing the initials ‘G O’ and the year 1774 Thomas Smith. Manchester pattern book (1783) Pocket with woven ‘marcella’ front ‘Two Ladies at Breakfast in their Dressing-Room’ (November 1794) ‘Morning Dresses’ ( July 1794) ‘Morning Dresses’ (November 1796) Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder, Portrait of Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna (1795) Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, Profile Image of the Children of Paul I Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, Portrait of Catherine II in the Image of Minerva (1789) Richard Cosway, Anne Seymour Damer (1785) Julie Charpentier, Le Dominiquin (1816–18) Drury Lane Theatre with Apollo-statue. The Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine (1 April 1795) Mrs Goldsmith, Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox (1703) Chinese hand-painted wallpaper (1775–85) used at Beaufort, Gloucester, MA Jean-Baptiste de Réveillon, sidewall block printed on handmade paper, Paris (c. 1785)

13 14 15 17 22 25 34 35 38 45 46 47 59 60 63 72 79 80 87 89 92 97 122 126

vii



List of Figures

viii List of Figures

Figure 26. Figure 27. Figure 28.

Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, from Tableaux-Teintures de Dufour and Leroy Stone in Suzhou garden Connections between the Houses of Hanover, Prussia and Brunswick Hester Piozzi’s annotations to James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (5th edn, 1807)

131 137 180 194



Figure 25.

Jennie Batchelor is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Kent. She is the author of Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), co-editor (with Cora Kaplan) of British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and has published various essays on dress, gender and sexuality in the eighteenth century. Rosalind Polly Blakesley is a Fellow of Pembroke College and Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on Russian art, including Russian Genre Painting in the Nineteenth Century (under her maiden name of Gray), and An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum (co-editor, 2003). Her latest book, The Arts and Crafts Movement, was published in 2006. Barbara Burman is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Textiles and Dress, University of Southampton. Her publications include The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking (editor and contributor, 1999) and Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective (co-editor and contributor with Carole Turbin, 2003). Angela Escott is a music librarian working with a national collection of music manuscripts and early editions of music. The subject of her doctoral thesis was the eighteenth-century dramatist, Hannah Cowley. She has published in Women’s Writing, Romanticism on the Net, has a chapter forthcoming in Prologues, Epilogues, Curtain-Raisers and Afterpieces: The Rest of the Eighteenth-Century London Stage, and an article forthcoming on an Oriental musical comedy in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. She is co-editing a volume of essays on women in the early modern period and the long eighteenth century. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the author of Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), the associate editor of Last Poems, 1821–1850 By William Wordsworth (Cornell University Press, 1999) and the author of articles on Jane Austen, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Fanny Burney and the aesthetic movement of the picturesque. Alessa Johns is Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis. She has published Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (2003) and Dreadful Visitations: Confronting Natural Catastrophe in the Age of Enlightenment (editor, 1999). She is currently reviews editor for Eighteenth-Century Studies. ix





Cora Kaplan is Visiting Professor of English in the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, and Professor Emerita of English in the School of Humanities, Southampton University. She is co-editor (with Jennie Batchelor) of British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Also with Jennie Batchelor, she is general editor of the Palgrave Macmillan ten-volume series, the The History of British Women’s Writing. Her most recent book is Victoriana – Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007). Ellen Kennedy Johnson’s teaching and research interests at Arizona State University revolve around the rhetoric of things, landscape, fashion, decorative objects, needlework and numerous other belongings as sources of insight into the meaning of eighteenth-century British and American literary texts. Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace is a Professor of English at Boston College. She is the author of Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (1991), Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the 18th Century (1997) and The British Slave Trade in Public Memory (2006). Marcia Pointon is Professor Emerita at Manchester University and Honorary Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute. Her most recent books are Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (1993) and Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture 1665–1800 (1997). Her book Brilliant Effects: Jewels, Jewellery and their Imagery is nearing completion. David Porter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (2001) and several articles on the Chinese taste in eighteenth-century England. Marjan Sterckx has an MA in Art History and a postgraduate degree in Cultural Studies, both from the University of Leuven. As a research assistant of the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders, associated with the Art History department of K.U. Leuven, she defended in September 2006 her PhD thesis on sculptures made by women in the metropolitan public space (Paris, London, Brussels, c. 1770–1953). Susan Staves’s scholarly interests centre on English literature and history in the Restoration and eighteenth century, particularly on how cultural ideologies are variously created and represented in texts ranging from comedies to judicial opinions. She is the author of Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (1979) and Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (1990). With John Brewer, she edited and contributed to Early Modern Conceptions of Property (Routledge, 1995). Staves has published over thirty articles on literary, historical and legal subjects. Her Literary History of Women’s



x


xi

Jonathan White completed a PhD titled ‘Luxury and the Poor: Ideas of Labouring-Class Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England’ at the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of Warwick in 2001. Between 2002 and 2003, he held the Past and Present Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research, before working with Barbara Burman on the AHRC ‘Pockets of History’ project at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. While continuing to publish on aspects of his research, he now works full time as Campaigns and Public Affairs Officer for the newly formed University and College Union (UCU).



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

This book evolved from an international conference, ‘Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830’, which took place over two days in July 2004 at the Chawton House Library in Chawton, Hampshire. We would like to thank the University of Southampton and the Trustees and staff of Chawton House Library who co-organised the conference and supported it in every way. Chawton House Library has been the inspiration for the conference and this collection: our particular thanks therefore to Sandy Lerner, Jane Alderson, Graeme Cottam, Kathy Quinn and Helen Scott. We would like to thank the British Academy both for their generous support of the ‘Women and Material Culture’ conference and for a Small Research Grant for the reproduction and permission costs for the images contained in this volume. As ever, our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Paula Kennedy, has been of immense help in making this volume possible and expediting its various stages. Finally, we would like to thank Sandy White, the Chawton secretary at Southampton, for her work on the conference and on the early stages of preparation of this volume.

xii



Acknowledgements

Introduction

Evelina Anville’s much quoted epistolary account of a day spent ‘a shopping’ in Frances Burney’s first novel (1778) encapsulates much of the ambivalence that characterises eighteenth-century responses to the consumer revolution.1 As an innocent abroad, she is suitably sceptical of, and amused by, the games played by ‘smirking’ mercers and ‘finical’ man-milliners to extort money from their female customers. But even this most virtuous of heroines is not entirely immune to the tantalising allure of material objects. Her description of her visits to purchase ‘silks, caps, gauzes, and so forth’ is related with a breathless excitement that could scarcely have been better calculated to arouse her guardian’s fears about his charge’s moral well-being.2 But Reverend Villars does not travel to London to return his ward to the safety of the country, for he knows that ‘a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World’ of eighteenth-century culture was, in no small part, marked by her entry into the world of goods. Burney’s novel brilliantly documents the anxious bewilderment and intense pleasure that attended these journeys – feelings laid bare by Evelina’s subsequent, and wilfully ambiguous, description of her newly dressed hair: ‘full of powder and black pins and a great cushion on the top of it. I believe you would hardly know me’. On the one hand, Evelina seems, here, to have been almost entirely consumed by the commodities in which she is adorned. Her hair has been ‘entangled’ and ‘frizled’ to such an extraordinary degree that she no longer has possession of her own body: ‘When I shall be able to make use of a comb for myself I cannot tell’.3 On the other, it is difficult not to detect palpable delight in the heroine’s account of the transformations made possible by powders, pins and cushions, or even, perhaps, a joyful recognition that such objects allow her to re-imagine herself in such a way that she becomes unrecognisable to those supposed to know her best. It is no coincidence, of course, that a novel about a young woman’s quest for self-possession is also deeply preoccupied with a world of material objects through and against which selfhood is inevitably defined.4 Material artefacts, Evelina reminds us, not only shape bodies and perceptions, but allow their possessors to establish their place in society. This book is likewise concerned with interactions between subjects 1





and objects and the meanings these interactions generate. Drawing on recent work in the fields of material culture and eighteenth-century studies,5 it examines the myriad ways in which objects constituted identity and mediated social, economic and political relationships in Europe between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries. In so doing, it builds on and seeks to complicate recent work on women’s role as agents of cultural production in the period. Eighteenth-century women’s material lives have, thankfully, become better known to us since Amanda Vickery lamented scholars’ unwillingness ‘to explore women’s relationship with the world of goods’ in The Gentleman’s Daughter (1998).6 Particularly instructive is the now sizeable body of work that has been produced on consumption, luxury, taste and politeness since the publication of John Brewer and Roy Porter’s Consumption and the World of Goods (1993).7 Women have increasingly taken centre stage in these accounts, in part, of course, in recognition of their centrality to eighteenth-century commentary on the consumer revolution and the luxury debates.8 That the female sex figured in such commentary as both a justification and scapegoat for the expansion of the trade in luxury items is now a familiar story.9 As Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace explains in Consuming Subjects (1997), the female consumer emerged in this period as a ‘paradoxical presence’, onto whose body was projected British culture’s ‘fondest wishes for the transforming power of consumerism and its deepest anxieties about the corrupting influence of goods’.10 Equally, if regrettably, familiar is the fact that female consumers’ engagements with the marketplace threatened to turn them into marketable commodities themselves. Eighteenth-century literature was, as Kowaleski Wallace demonstrates, as likely to represent female shoppers being voraciously consumed by retailers or their own (material) desires as it was to imagine them as autonomous economic agents.11 Satirists and opponents of consumption pointed out frequently and forcefully that material possessions were as likely to ruin you as to make you. The individual who defined ‘his or her sexual, social, and ethical identity through the selection of goods’ risked, as Erin Mackie suggests, ‘a kind of psychic colonisation by the commodity’.12 Such fears are the focus of Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace’s and Jennie Batchelor’s contributions to this volume. Kowaleski Wallace’s suggestively titled ‘White Slavery: Hannah More, Women and Fashion’ investigates More’s uncomfortable elision of the white fashion victim and black slave to illuminate paradoxes in and connections between the author’s gender and racial politics, as well as casting new light on her attitudes to consumption. For More, fashionable consumption was just another form of colonisation that destroyed mind, body and soul. But More was not the only commentator who wished to deny women ‘meaningful interaction with a world of goods’. Eighteenth-century critics of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) were, as Batchelor shows, quick to turn the heroine’s use of material objects against her to imagine her as little more than a prattling commodity. The commodification of the heroine in this early criticism, as well as in Pamela



2

3

merchandise and the object-narrator novel, which Batchelor reads as a response to the Pamela phenomenon, speaks not only to the difficulties women faced when seeking to define themselves through material artefacts, but also to anxieties about the commercialisation of the literary marketplace and the alienability of literary property. As these essays indicate, consumption was deeply meaningful in eighteenthcentury culture; however its meanings were not confined to the forms of debilitating sexual and economic peril typically, but not universally, imagined by the eighteenth-century novel. Jillian Heydt-Stevenson’s essay on hats, for example, indicates that a number of Romantic fictional heroines deployed fashionable commodities to fend off the social systems that threatened to take possession of them. This essay, like all those concerned with the politics of consumption in this volume, understands consumption as a wilful act – something instigated by rather than something that happens to the shopper – an event that is productive of meaning, even if the consumer does not entirely master those meanings. One way to unlock these significations is to look beyond the act of purchase itself – ‘a mere snapshot in the life of a commodity’ as Amanda Vickery points out13 – to the non-verbal meanings ascribed to or inherent in material objects. Barbara Burman and Jonathan White’s analysis of the material properties and cultural significance of the tie-on pocket adopts such an approach to elucidate how this specific and peculiarly resonant item of costume reproduced and negotiated women’s subjectivity, and reveals, to the modern scholar, a gendered investment in history, memory and place. That artefacts are repositories of meaning is also the starting point of David L. Porter’s essay on English responses to the aesthetic principles and cultural ideals embedded in Chinese decorative objects. Porter’s discussion of how this vision allowed women to re-imagine their lives and relationships reinforces Judy Attfield’s assertion that the relationship between ‘culture and materiality, object/subject’, which ‘produces meaning’, is dynamic rather than static.14 Another important aspect of this dynamism is signalled by the fluctuations in meaning generated by the uses to which objects are put by their possessors. Thus Marcia Pointon’s essay on women and their jewels examines these artefacts as ‘markers’ of identity, rank and wealth, the import of which was determined by how they were displayed and circulated among individuals. Pointon’s chapter, like Susan Staves’s fascinating contribution ‘How Did Eighteenth-century Women Writers Get the Books They Read?’, indicates the limitations of studying women’s relationship with the material world solely in terms of consumption. Like jewels, books could be inherited, received as gifts or borrowed, diverse modes of distribution and circulation that spoke to the recipient’s/borrower’s position within wider familial, social and political structures. Among the most invigorating insights of recent eighteenth-century scholarship has been the recognition that women’s roles in these larger structures has been much less peripheral and much more instrumental than previously imagined. Histories of consumption are being enriched and complicated by



Introduction


new histories of production, which focus on the workplace, the art world, the literary marketplace and the stage to shed light on the cultural effects of women’s interventions within the public sphere. New work on eighteenthcentury print culture has played a particularly important role in revising past assumptions, as Alessa Johns’s essay on book publishing and collecting in eighteenth-century Germany suggests. Johns’s account of aristocratic German women’s engagement in such activities reveals a commitment to a powerful and patriotic form of ‘gendered cosmopolitanism’ through which these women established themselves as arbiters of taste. In addition to revisionist histories of print culture, new studies of women artists, patrons and musicians have illuminated women’s status as agents of cultural production.15 Part II of this book, entitled ‘Women and Sculpture’, includes three essays that advance this field of research in their accounts of the figure and works of the woman artist during a period in which she was systematically excluded from artistic production and appreciation. All three essays acknowledge the personal and professional prejudices faced by women consumers and producers of the arts, but challenge dominant accounts that consider the roles of woman and artist irreconcilable. Angela Escott’s reading of the representation of the female artist in Hannah Cowley’s plays reveals this figure to be an empowering one, with which the playwright could identify and through which she could challenge the notions of connoisseurship and the gendering of art (associated with creation as opposed to procreation) as a masculine preserve. Marjan Sterckx’s discussion of the various constraints under which women sculptors and wax modellers laboured takes us away from the world of the theatre to the very real struggles endured and the successes enjoyed by a small but significant group of European female artists, forced to contend with the gendered assumptions that governed their artistic practice. But sex and status were not necessarily constraints on the female artist, as Rosalind Blakesley’s essay on Maria Fedorovna, wife of Tsar Paul I, argues. Fedorovna’s story reveals how this extraordinary woman used her position to establish herself as a consumer, producer and patron of the arts and surely one of the most significant taste-makers of her day. As eighteenth-century women writers, artists and patrons begin to be seen more fully by modern critics and historians as independent agents and producers of culture, they acquire ethical responsibilities commensurate to their newly recognised independence. The more their choices are respected, the more their relationship to everyday commodities, the standards taste, and of course their own cultural work comes under scrutiny and debate. In like manner, when twenty-first-century scholars, as a useful conceit, animate material culture, they do not necessarily agree about the narratives that things can tell and the subjectivities they create. The reflex of negative association of women with consumption and fashion, an eighteenth-century discourse that was itself a consumable, as contributors show, has a long tail that still wags today. Where commodities, or the discourse of consumption involving



4

5

women, related to materials or practices from the expanding British Empire, or its global non-European trading partners, the debate about the meanings that accrue to the relationship becomes especially heated. As Kowaleski Wallace notes, contemporary critics devised ethical discourse that would estrange women from their things: Hannah More wanted to make ‘fashion’ something women should regard as ‘foreign’, to be abjected and expelled. The language of Orientalism and of enslavement deployed by eighteenth-century commentators to discourage women’s attachment to luxury, and to damn the affect that went with it, has, as Kowaleski Wallace suggests, a peculiarly unliberating resonance today. This occurs not simply because the analogy between women and fashion and chattel slaves seems to diminish and trivialise the condition of the latter, but because white-authored anti-slavery discourses themselves were freighted with racial hierarchy and forms of affective identification, which created new forms of psychic and social domination. Mobilised as a metaphor for women’s subjugation to fashion, anti-slavery rhetoric conferred on women a dubious ‘free’ subjectivity. Here is an example of how the structuring language of Empire informs the ‘domestic’ critique, and vice versa: More, conservative in her national politics and social thinking yet strongly anti-slavery, is by no means a unique instance of this effect. Ellen Kennedy Johnson, for example, traces the evolution of wallpaper for domestic use first imported from China through its more affordable adaptation at the height of its popularity in chinoiserie imitations which altered the scenes to conform better with western conceptions of Chinese difference to its gradual fall from grace in the second half of the century in favour of a ‘home-grown’ national style of picturesque which drew from the Gothic. The shifting terms of class can be read in the vicissitudes of taste in wallpaper – but also the development of nationalist feeling. China scenes, even domesticated in chinoiserie, come to represent a form of aesthetic mongrelisation subtly inflected with a ‘flowery’ femininity, and wallpaper which represents a more masculine, national symbolism, becomes patriotism by other means. Yet our essayists remind us that it is possible to read the importation of goods and their evolving meanings in different registers. There are, for example, other instances generating new models of the ways in which the effects of Empire and trade enter British consciousness. Porter lists ‘four types of responses – wonder, assimilation, repudiation, and fantasy –’ as the modes through which Chinese artefacts entered the English imagination. The importation of objects and images from other parts of the world does not necessarily provoke in their female consumers a response that can be politically written off as ‘protoOrientalist’. Instead, Porter offers a paradigm of translation that takes account of Ming aesthetics, the gendered classicism of influential contemporaries like Reynolds and the feminist scholarship of recent years which has begun to explore the alternative aesthetics of everyday practices such as conversation – or gossip. The analogies described in this model raise the regularly debased elements of female subjectivity to a kind of art-form that prizes singularity,



Introduction


‘surprise’, ‘curiosity’ and fantasy itself. Porter’s speculative exercise – his development of a paradigm that questions whether analyses which argue that every appropriation of otherness is proto-imperialist and that resists subliminally misogynist readings of women’s cultural practices – offers another route towards understanding the complex and unexpected stories that material culture and its symbiotic relationship with female subjects can generate. The language of things as objects and references is always a situated, symbolising one, impulsive and surprising in its uses and effects, and never to be taken for granted. The misadventures with wallpaper that beset Maria Edgeworth’s Lady Clonbury in The Absentee, are, as Johnson notes, indicative of domestic decoration’s role in creating a nationalising discourse. At the same time, Lady Clonbury’s wallpaper introduces China as a third term in a novel whose main focus is the dissonance between English and Irish culture and Ireland and the Anglo-Irish, adding another complicating strand to the development of imperial taste and national subjectivity. We know as much of Fanny as we can through her plain white pockets and their history, itself full of missing elements and conflicting interpretation, as Burman and White make clear, but unlike the ‘it-narratives’, Fanny’s pockets cannot pretend to give us the full – or even the inside – story of her subjectivity. The sophisticated interdisciplinarity of recent work on material culture, represented by the essays in this volume, accepts that no single discourse can perform that function. Novels and poetry, as Batchelor and Kowaleski Wallace among others remind us, offer us narratives within a set of literary conventions whose history and politics remain to be teased out by critics and historians. Imaginative literature’s perspectives on persons and things, its cautions and idealisations, do not represent any fixed truth about the period, but rather gesture towards conflicting versions of its moral and social imperatives – a way of constituting rather than reflecting class, nationality, gender and subjectivity. Staves and Johns remind us how much books convey meaning even before they are opened or read – how embedded they are in networks of family and friends, of rank and privilege, yet are so dynamic a force, their circulation as cultural capital bringing, as so many other objects discussed in this volume do, the public and private, male and female, domestic and foreign worlds into symbiosis, as well as serving to separate and distinguish them. It can be no accident that the surge of interest in eighteenth-century material culture – and in its relation to women – in the last two decades coincides with traumatic political, social and economic transformation of late capitalism, inaugurating a new era where the value and movement of commodities seems more certain than the identity, and in some cases even the survival, of subjects and nations. Many of the hierarchical and ethical issues raised by eighteenthcentury practices and discourses on material culture’s effect on modernising societies remain alive for us, and ever more urgent, as unrestrained consumption coupled with appalling scarcity threatens to demolish rather than simply corrupt the inhabited world. (One must consciously resist the easy moralising



6

7

of it into the revenge of things on their collective makers, mankind.) Paradoxically perhaps, this impending Armageddon – before us in the news alongside advertisements for more and better consumer items – coincides with a much more ethically nuanced and historically complex take on the eighteenthcentury world of production and consumption that has inaugurated our own age. We are rather less disposed to praise and to blame its attitudes and actions today, although its uncanny stories compel us as never before. In particular, by seeing women (or femininity) as neither the scapegoated amoral consumers or the pitiable victims of fashion, but as gendered subjects constituted – like, but never exactly like, men – through commodity culture, active producers of it and its meanings, work on material culture has been liberated into a more interesting and productive space for understanding the past, present and future of that many-layered, often contradictory, relationship between women and material culture. This collection of essays aims to expand the scope and the terms of that exploration.

Notes 1 Frances Burney, Evelina; or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, ed. Edward A. Bloom, with an introduction and notes by Vivien Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 28. 2 Burney, p. 29. 3 Burney, p. 29. 4 Evelina is, of course, attempting to reclaim her name and birthright as the legitimate daughter of Sir John Belmont. 5 See, for example, Daniel Miller, ed., Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (London: UCL Press, 1998); Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000); Victor Buchli, The Material Culture Reader (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002); Daniel Miller, ed., Materiality (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005). Relevant work in eighteenth-century studies is discussed below. 6 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 183. 7 John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). This collection is indebted to, even while it complicates, Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb’s jointly written The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (London: Europa, 1982). 8 On these debates, see, for example, Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury in Europe, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires, and Delectable Goods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Oxford University Press, 2005). 9 See, for example, Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (London: Cornell University Press, 1993); Erin Mackie,



Introduction

10 11 12 13 14 15

Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Kowaleski Wallace, p. 5. Kowaleski Wallace, p. 5. Mackie, p. 47. Vickery, p. 183. Attfield, p. 138. See, for example, Melissa Hyde and Jennifer Milam, eds., Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).



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Part I Dress and Adornment





1 Women and their Jewels

In September 1735, Grace Boyle, aged about fifteen, wrote to her friend, Anne Strafford: Many things have happened to me since I came here [to London] viz: the borring [sic] of my Ears, Papa’s giving me a pair of £100 Earrings, a pink Diamond ring, & a pair of gold buckles . . . with 4 guineas for my pocket. Mama is giving me a pair of star Earrings, a set of stay buckles, & an Ermine muff. So I think I came to town to some purpose.1 In thinking about the relationship between women and jewels there are various things here we might notice: first, gems (diamonds) come in the form of jewellery, made up into a ring, buckle and earrings (requiring the piercing of Anne’s ears); second, what is acquired has a price, which is part of the news imparted; third, the acquisition is seen as justifying the trip to town; fourth, the jewellery is spoken of in relation to another acquisition (an ermine muff); and fifth, in addition to the gifts already received from her father, Anne expects to receive more from her mother. This is, it seems, a family affair – perhaps a coming-of-age ritual. The itemising of these luxury artefacts is, moreover, deemed a proper subject for a correspondence between two young women. In other words, it has an emotive content. My subject is the relationship of women to jewels and jewellery from the late seventeenth into the nineteenth century. It is, however, important to note in passing that at least until the end of the Regency, jewellery such as rings, watches, shoe buckles, jewelled boxes and ornamented canes were an important part of the self-presentation rituals pertaining to sociable masculinity, and that men like John Evelyn and Horace Walpole were avid collectors of gems and antique jewellery. Masculinity was not, however, discursively tied in with a relationship to jewels in the way femininity was. One generation usually finds unfashionable the jewellery of the preceding one; stones are removed and reset and consequently examples from earlier periods are rare. In addition to material examples that do survive, I draw on 11



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letters, paintings and other visual material, trade manuals and commercial records, etiquette books and fiction. Changing styles in jewellery are subject to economic, technical and social determinants. We might notice how, with the opening up of diamond mines in Brazil in the 1770s and the mastery of diamond faceting upon which the sparkle associated with this stone depends, diamonds surpass in popularity the dominant pearl of the seventeenth century. We might also observe that individual items such as stay buckles which appear frequently in documentary evidence in the eighteenth century disappear in the early nineteenth when ornamenting the area at the waist where the bodice connected with the skirt was no longer possible when women’s waists disappeared under loose-fitting Regency muslin gowns.2 We might recognise the shift that occurred when, in the 1770s, with the success of Matthew Boulton and the development of mass-produced jewellery in Birmingham, jewellers and goldsmiths who produced and marketed their own products, as they had since the Middle Ages, were joined by manufacturers and retailers, a moment when women as a labour force became makers as well as wearers. My focus is on the long eighteenth century and, while recognising that goods and responses themselves change, my account suggests the questions raised by jewellery practices remain fairly constant. With the effective demise of the sumptuary laws in England at the end of the sixteenth century, attitudes to luxury were widely debated, but there is little evidence that people changed their behaviour as a result. On the other hand, the prevalence of etiquette books for women published from the early years of the nineteenth century suggests something like an informal reintroduction of explicit regulation in regard to possessions and appearance. What did it mean for women to own jewels and to be involved in jewellery transactions? Commissioning, purchasing, selling and giving are all empowering procedures for women of substance. At the same time, being a recipient of jewels carried obligations and gave rise to possibilities and to dangers. What did it mean for women to wear jewellery – whether their own or others’? To what effect was the physical and economic relationship between women and jewels read and understood by contemporaries in actuality and in representation, whether verbally or visually? These are some of the questions pertinent to my subject.3 Women of the gentry and nobility began acquiring jewels from birth. Baptismal gifts were common and the evidence of portraits, from the sixteenth century, show children (female and male) throughout Europe wearing bracelets and necklaces, endorsed by documentary sources.4 Often, children’s jewellery was prophylactic: coral (the origins of which lay, according to Ovid, with the beheading of the Medusa) was believed to ward off the evil eye of sickness and protect children from plague.5 It was employed for necklaces and bracelets and also for teething rings (Figure 1) elaborately made from silver and coral in a form later mass-produced by manufacturers like Boulton.



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Figure 1 Joseph Highmore (1692–1780), Mrs. Sharpe and her Child, oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Children’s jewellery was valuable and could catch the eye of a thief; one of Moll Flanders’ early acts of felony involved robbing a little girl by pretending to help her: the Child had a little necklace on of Gold Beads, and I had my Ey [sic] upon that, and in the dark of the Ally I stoop’d, pretending to mend the Child’s Clog that was loose, and took off her Necklace and the Child never felt it . . .6 As girls approached marriageable age, and especially when they were presented at court, jewellery was essential as it denoted the standing of the family and their ability to provide a dowry. The successful coming-out of the Duchess of Devonshire’s daughter, Little G, in 1800 involved her presentation at court wearing the Cavendish diamonds.7 Engagements and weddings among the



Women and their Jewels 13

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Figure 2 (a) and (b) English mourning ring, 1791, inscribed front ‘THOU SHALT ARISE IN GLORY’; obverse ‘Jane Allanson obt 27th August 1791 aet. 45’. Stadt Koln: Museum fur Angewandte Kunst.

nobility and aristocracy were accompanied by lavish gifts from the groom to the bride. When in 1754 John Spencer (Little G’s grandfather) proposed to Georgiana Poyntz, he ‘blushingly produced a diamond and ruby ring within which was inscribed “Mon coeur est à toi. Garde le bien pour moi”’.8 Rings, owing to their form, symbolise eternity, and their inner hidden surfaces were often inscribed with texts, commemorating the death of a loved one (Figure 2) or as a record of love or friendship.9 The amount of jewellery acquired by a bride was a subject for public reporting and debate. Every item given by George III to Queen Charlotte at their wedding and coronation, which took place within a week in 1761, was widely reported and publicly described. Her stomacher – a hinged piece covering the front bodice and designed for the display of the maximum number of diamonds – was particularly admired. When, in 1774, shortly after her wedding, the Duchess of Devonshire was presented at court, her diamonds were approved as ‘very magnificent’. The earrings alone cost £3,994 and newspapers speculated that the entire ensemble was worth over £10,000.10 Women might add to jewels acquired at marriage by several legitimate means – as gifts marking particular occasions11 or as purchases with their, often substantial, pin-money.12 Women might inherit from blood relatives or from friends. Dame Sarah Humble in 1734, for example,



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Figure 3 Chatelaine, gold with enamel decoration, mid-eighteenth century. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Freidsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam (32.100.316).

left her daughter ‘these jewells following (vizt) a pair of diamond earrings with three drops to each of them and my solitaire and girdle buckle my hoop ring and my brilliant diamond ring’, while the Hon. Elizabeth Lady Compton in 1742 left her niece and goddaughter Lady Anne Compton ‘my large pearl necklace of thirty seven pearls and also my large pair of pearl drops’ and her niece Lady Charlotte Compton ‘the locket with my mother’s hair set round with diamonds’.13 The mistress of a well-established household might have




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possessed a chatelaine which would have hung from her waist – an ensemble including in elaborate cases keys, scissors, smelling salts and seals (Figure 3). A well-documented case from the late eighteenth century is that of the Delaval family. The first Lady Delaval corresponded regularly with London jewellers: on 10 January 1772, for example, Charles Belliard addressed to her an invoice for the following services: ‘setting a picture [i.e. a miniature] with brill(iants) & rubies & a case, setting up of Earrings, mending a bouquet & a case, 7 rose pins, A pr of Buckles, 154 roses added in 3 Bows, Setting 3 Bows’.14 The paperwork makes it clear that this, typically, was a question of some new items (the pins and buckles) and some adaptations. Lady Delaval supplied some of the diamonds, perhaps from other pieces that had become unfashionable, and was billed for additional stones. The total was £152 17s.15 Lower down the social scale, Jane Forbes Skene, wife of a wealthy Scottish lawyer resident near Aberdeen in the first half of the nineteenth century, shopped with the Edinburgh firm Marshall and Sons. In an invoice that is again addressed to her, not to her husband (who used the same source for separate purchases), we read a long list of objects bought between October 1818 and June 1819, a list indicative of the wide range of services that jewellers and goldsmiths typically offered: plated snuffles (for candles), repairing a tea urn, a pair of silver buttons, a coral necklace, a gold clasp, a pebble brooch, a gilt purse clasp, four pairs of beads, a pair of scissors, a fine gold ring, a silver lemon strainer, a second-hand silver soup ladle, engraving a crest on the ladle, a blue turquoise necklace and five silver desert spoons, which were also engraved. The total cost was £14 11s.16 Lacking access to the metropolis, women could have items sent on approval or commission others to shop for them. The Countess of Leven in 1693, for example, had no problem in acquiring through a correspondent in London 8½ yards of ‘an Indian stuff if fashionable’, satin for a nightgown, in ordering a ‘hair ring’ set with diamonds (most probably a mourning ring) and in enquiring about the price of a harpsichord and an armchair.17 We find Lady Anne Strafford, who was evidently a keen shopper, sending her friend Jane Cockburn on a number of errands in London some time in the early to mid-1730s. Jane reported back: I went according to Dear Lady Anne’s commands to day to Mrs. Shanays & got the Buckle which if Papa comes out tomorrow or monday shall be sent I could not meet with a necklace such as Lady Betty desired ready strung, but bespoke one which will be done by tuesday & come to about seven shillings: the night earrings I enquired after at seven shops but can meet with no such thing for they make none but with drops: but ⬍tear⬎ you may have tops without the drops that sort set in gold for fifteen & the garnett sort in gold for twelve or thirteen shillings I would not buy any of these but I have informed your Ladysp and received further orders: Mrs. Shanay had one pair of garnet, quite red almost: night earrings which I’m sure Dear Lady Anne would not wear, and she asked a guinea for them. I have at last got some bobs which I hope will do . . .18



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For women lower down the social scale, peddlers and itinerant salespeople at fairgrounds could provide the means of acquiring jewellery and related objects – combs, garters and ribbons. Evidence remains understandably limited. However, nineteenth-century fiction suggests that cheap jewellery worn inappropriately signalled moral danger.19 Once they had acquired them, women might sell or otherwise dispose of jewels which were frequently their only valuable material possessions. Jewellery events, acquisitions or losses instantiate the particular ways in which women inhabited social and economic networks that were both emotive and ideological. Jewel objects constitute what Mieke Bal has called subjectivised elements in a narrative.20 It is, therefore, not surprising that jewellery often figures within fictional representations of the crises endangering marital harmony and social stability. Two examples will suffice. In Hogarth’s Piquet, or Virtue in Danger (Figure 4), executed as a commission for Lord Charlemont in 1761 and engraved under the title The Lady’s Last Stake, the subject of Piquet, according to the artist, was ‘a young and virtuous married lady, who, by playing cards with a young officer, loses her money, watch, and jewels; the moment when he offers them back in return for her honour, and she is wavering at his suit, was my point of time’.21 The woman’s posture, arms and hands seemingly

Figure 4 William Hogarth, Piquet or Virtue in Danger (The Lady's Last Stake), 1758–9, oil on canvas. Buffalo, New York: Albright Knox Gallery.




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remote from her lap, leaves her open to assault and, though she turns the fireguard to shield her face from the roaring fire, her heightened colour (we are invited to understand) is caused by her internal fires.22 For all the apparent social poise of the female piquet player, evidence of dissolution is everywhere: cards are thrown on the fire and lie half-burnt in the grate suggesting temper and despair, on the table and the floor are letters and papers, in the lower right corner lies abandoned what appears to be a dated invoice.23 But the woman still has fresh flowers in her corsage and has not, in fact, yielded all her jewels since there are pearls in her hair and she has at least one earring. The remainder of her jewellery is spilling out of a tricorn hat that the young man thrusts towards her. It thus occupies the most prominent position in the painting at the front plane of the image marked by the hem of her dress as it spreads across the floor. Clearly visible in the hat are gold coins, a diamond and ruby cross, a piece of paper on which is written ‘for bond’, and a pearl bracelet on which is mounted a portrait of her husband surrounded by diamonds.24 The sparkling cross would have reminded viewers of Belinda, in The Rape of the Lock (‘On her white Breast a sparkling Cross she wore, / Which Jews might kiss, and Infidels adore’).25 The hat full of jewellery indicates the woman has already relinquished whatever she might have had the right to dispose of; the note on the floor will have to be paid by her husband. What might seem an act of seduction – the couple appear to exchange flirtatious glances and gestures – is a moment of economic exchange that is also a crisis of sexual transaction. Piquet provoked a poetic response from one viewer in which the female subject removes first one piece of jewellery, then the next, as in a dramatised inventory or striptease. The watch, bracelet, necklace and other trinkets are, cumulatively, the treasure that lies finally in the hat as the woman contemplates the threshold between the social world of bodily ornament and the necessity of delivering up the treasure which all jewels ultimately stand in for: the carnal ‘treasure’ of her sex: The cards run cross, she fumes and frets, Her brilliant necklace soon she betts, She fears her watch, but can’t resist, ... Her bracelet next became his prize, And in his hat the treasure lies, Upon her Virtue next he treats And Honour’s sacred name repeats.26 The relations between men and women in marriage had been vigorously debated during the passage through parliament in 1753 of the Clandestine Marriages Bill, which was ostensibly designed to prevent rich heirs and heiresses from being seduced into elopement with their social inferiors but which, it



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was argued by opponents, gave the word ‘marriage’ a new significance.27 Gambling, which was widespread among women as well as men, was associated with marital boredom and financial risk since married men were liable for their wives’ debts. Piquet represents a woman in danger, but the threat to her virtue is less the result of her own folly at playing cards for stakes she cannot afford than one consequence of a society in which women were believed to be naturally in possession of a greater moral sense than men, a view that was profoundly undermined by the same society’s tolerance of prostitution.28 It was also a society that regarded marriage, to quote a contemporary source, as the nation’s ‘Manufactory for making children’.29 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire might almost have been a model for Piquet. A reckless gambler who accumulated enormous debts that she attempted to have serviced by her jeweller, Georgiana’s profligacy threatened her marriage and her health, and led her mother to write to her in 1782: I suspect some mischief or other – that you have bespoke more things than you can possibly afford and have given him things of value in exchange . . . at all events I beg you will never part with Jewells. I have often told you they are not your own and should be looked upon as things entrusted to your care – do not pass over this article without answering.30 Lady Spencer is referring here to the issue of heirlooms which, before 1882, is extremely complex, as readers of Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873) will not fail to appreciate. These complexities hinge on the understanding that husband and wife are one person in law, and therefore permission by the husband for the wife to wear particular pieces of jewellery cannot be understood as a gift of them in deed or law. However, under the term ‘paraphernalia’ all sorts of things were possible, and in practice, as the great legal authority Blackstone ruled, those jewels and ornaments that a wife has worn suitable to her rank and degree may become her entitlement at death, over and above her jointure or dower.31 Husbands might try to ensure that their wives maintained control of their jewels when they became widows by making a written statement; the first Lady Delaval’s first husband left a declaration dated 1743 that the jewels ‘are the sole and absolute property of my dearly beloved wife . . . and that it always was my Intention that they should be so, and at her absolute disposal in all Events’.32 In 1783, the Duchess of Devonshire published her novel The Sylph in which she included an episode involving the heroine’s jewels.33 The fragility of ownership of paraphernalia is suggested in The Sylph. In writing her novel, Georgiana transposed onto the husband of the heroine, Julia, her own propensity for gambling. Sir William tells his wife he is ruined and she, despite the ill-treatment he has meted out to her, generously tells him things may not be as bad as they seem as she has valuable jewels and ‘the sale of them will produce a great deal of money’. He shouts: ‘Jewels! O God! they are gone, you have no jewels.’




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She, thinking he has gone mad, rushes to fetch her jewel box, whereupon he snatches the jewels out of her hand and dashes them on the floor, saying they are only paste. In astonishment Julia asks what he means, she is sure they are the ones she received from him. He then reveals that when they went to the jewellers to be reset he sold the stones and had them replaced with paste. Julia is mortified less by the financial loss than by the fact that though she is ‘ignorant in jewels; everyone who has seen me must have discovered their fallacy. How contemptible then have you made us appear!’34 Jewels are potentially portable wealth and remain even to this day an internationally favoured form of currency. Julia’s husband cheated her of what was her entitlement, for her own use but not to be disposed of. What the story also reveals, however, is the importance of jewels as a visible measure of a family’s wealth. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in old age is said to have periodically worn her jewels in order to demonstrate that she had not pawned them.35 The fallacy of Julia’s diamonds was topical. From the earliest times attempts have been made to replicate gemstones; tracts on alchemy from the sixteenth century commonly describe how to produce imitation pearls and other stones. In the mid-eighteenth century the Pinchbecks, father and son, perfected the production of imitation gold and paste stones.36 Notices that they placed in the newly expanded popular press indicate that they were unapologetic about the base materials of their products: We hear for certain that Mr. Pinchbeck from London will be in town this week, with a variety of Toys in his curious metal; as likewise a Curious Parcel of jewellers’ Work, as Diamond Rings both brilliant and Roses, Stone Buckles of all sorts. He also has lately invented an Artificial Stone, call’d the Pinchbeck Diamond, which he sets in Gold Rings, and so nearly resembles the Rose in all its properties, that it has often deceived the best Judges, and is so hard that it will stand the File, which is allowed to be a Perfection that no Artificial Stone ever had before.37 The extent of Pinchbeck’s success can be measured by the fact that his name rapidly became synonymous with anything counterfeit.38 The survival of Pinchbeck diamonds in profusion indicates how popular they were. As a Woman of Fashion declares in a poem of 1778 in the form of a letter from Lady Maria Modish to Lady Belinda Artless: My diamonds are most of them gone, here and there; A few with false stones now assist in the Glare. Thus, what with my Gaming, my Tradesmen and Bets, Twenty thousand, I think, would not clear off my debts.39 The very popularity of Pinchbeck contributed to a more general debate about authenticity and appearance. Gemstones were precious products of



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nature, cut and polished (the techniques for accomplishing this were rapidly improved during the period in question) and transformed by human skill from rough to finished object glittering in candlelight. Until Jean-Antoine Lavoisier’s experiments in the late eighteenth century established that they consist of carbon, diamonds were thought to be indestructible. Diamonds represented fortitude and endurance (the Greek word is ‘adamas’) and the terminology of diamonds permeated through commonplace metaphors the articulation of social values. Thus Fanny Burney, in Camilla (1796), has Ensign Macdersey say of the exquisite Indiana: ‘O what a beautiful creature she is! her outside is the completest diamond I ever saw! And if her inside is the same, which I dare say it is, by her smiles and delicate dimples, she must be a paragon upon earth!’40 Mrs Delany’s comment on the Duke of Devonshire prior to his marriage was that ‘the jewell has not been well polished’.41 The term ‘a rough [i.e. unpolished] diamond’ still indicates today a person who is fundamentally sound, but unsophisticated in manner. It was a requirement of station that jewels should be worn appropriately and that they should be genuine. For a great lady to appear without jewels was to make a very strong statement. It is therefore significant that Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, when Keeper of the Bedchamber at the court of Queen Anne and a hugely powerful political figure, was portrayed by Kneller wearing only the key of her office at her waist and otherwise devoid of ornaments (Figure 5). Yet she was known to possess vast quantities of diamonds, of which she kept detailed records; she used her precious stones not only to impress but also to exert pressure on relatives by loans or gifts.42 However, many did wear counterfeit gems and in moral discourse jewels stood for superfluity and superficiality. William Blake’s observation in the margins of the Discourses written by the society portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds draws on a long tradition of Puritan critique in linking jewels with the unnatural: ‘Some look to see the sweet Outlines / And beauteous Forms that Love does wear [;] / Some look to find out Patches, Paint, / Bracelets & Stays & Powderd Hair [.]’43 The contradictions around the meanings of women and jewels were intensified by practices of borrowing and hiring. Just as on Oscar night Hollywood stars appear resplendent in jewels that everyone knows they do not own and that are reported in the popular press with the names of the jewellers who have lent them, so it was neither uncommon nor frowned upon for a society woman to parade in public in jewels that did not belong to her or to her family. Mrs Delany describes herself attending court in 1729 ‘in all my best array, borrowed my Lady Sunderland’s jewels, and made a tearing show’,44 while Horace Walpole, who regularly records women in borrowed jewels, describes how, in 1742, the Princess of Saxe Gotha attended the Duke of Norfolk’s masquerade ‘vastly bejewelled’ courtesy of a diamond merchant who lent her gratis £40,000 of jewels, ‘only desiring that she would tell whose they were’.45 Meanwhile the gossipy Mrs Powys noted in 1777 that Miss Hodges was shining in all Lady Villiers’ diamonds valued at £12,000.46




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Figure 5 After Sir Godfrey Kneller, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, oil on canvas, c. 1700, London: National Portrait Gallery.

Borrowing jewels was sanctioned by royalty. At her coronation Queen Charlotte was able to impress everyone with her own jewels thanks to the King’s generosity, but Queen Caroline had been obliged to resort to other means and, as people observed, to achieve her splendid appearance she borrowed from the Jewish diamond dealer Shirac, as well as from everyone in London who was willing to lend. The result was stupendous but her robes as a consequence were so heavy that a pulley had to be devised to enable her to kneel and stand again.47 All this suggests that the use of portraits as evidence of what women owned or wore is tendentious: where household accounts have survived, as with the Delaval family of Northumberland, it is not possible to correlate items listed with objects represented in portraits.48 We have to understand that portraits are themselves fictitious – counters in the same networks of representation to which jewels and clothing also belong. The transformative character of jewellery serves a social and economic purpose. Although it was acceptable to wear borrowed or hired jewels, financial



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value had to be displayed but simultaneously disguised. Jewellery history might be said to be the history of transforming economic value into transcendent (aesthetic and moral) worth, an achievement brought about through concentration on the particular at the expense of the general and through miniaturisation. Jewels were to women what real estate was to men. And it is this capacity for transformation – this lending itself to stand as both material and immaterial, to be malleable and changeable while representing permanence – that situates jewels and jewellery as a powerful agent in the dynamics and in the politics of femininity. History tends to detach feelings and thoughts from the bodies of people who had them. Likewise sight is understood as a disembodied faculty. The hands of craftsmen and artists are by contrast registered through the things they made, so that we speak, for example, of an object showing signs of a master’s ‘hand’. But what of the bodies of those who commissioned, purchased, gave and received precious artefacts? For them the sense of touch may have been as important as the sense of sight. The character of jewelled boxes and jewel-surrounded miniatures reminds us that this was so. Verbal and visual narratives rhetorically instantiate the paramount importance of physical engagement with the object. The Revd Samuel Bishop, who wrote a series of verses to accompany gifts to his wife, narrates the moment of discovery when she receives into her hands the orange-bergamot snuffbox he has had made to celebrate their wedding anniversary. Bishop tells his wife that boxes ‘of modish make’ take ‘value from an artist’s name’, from the ‘curious hinge’ and ‘the costly rim’. He continues: An husband, as in duty bound, presents, what an admirer found: Pray start not when you lift the lid! A portrait in a snuff box hid: Aye marry, and myself alone Can boast th’ original my own . . .49 ‘Original’ refers here both to the lady in question and to her full-size portrait from which the miniature is in all likelihood taken, both of which Bishop claims to own. In this witty conceit, the poet takes a surprise object involving a miniature and then himself writes to accompany the gift a poem which celebrates both gift and wife. Touch and look are required simultaneously to deliver the pleasure of the moment, which is also a pleasure in representing a literary conceit, as if in a closed box waiting to be opened.50 Some groups deliberately eschewed jewellery for religious reasons: Quaker women were associated with clean, pure looks. Addison contrasted the appearance of a young Quaker woman in a stagecoach with that of her travelling companion, a dirty beau with a filthy wig on whose finger glittered a diamond, by saying that the woman was like the diamond glittering in the filth of the




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has thrown herself away on a person not of our Society, and is likely to be much disappointed in the only thing she married for, viz., to show away, as tis called, herself. He gratified her vanity a few months, she shone at all public places of diversion; displayed her jewels and fine clothing upon every occasion . . . and now I find is obliged to hear the unpleasant account of the necessity of retrenching and submitting to learn the duties of a wife.52 In mid-eighteenth-century philosophical dialogues from Lord Kames to Adam Smith, the issue of ornament is an important one, especially in its relation to use and expenditure, and jewels (the most precious and apparently the most useless of ornaments) are frequently discussed. Flowers, which, like jewels, were richly symbolic and in their own way also a luxury, are often perceived as a natural alternative to jewels: it is significant that in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) the Rousseauesque Virginia rejects diamond earrings in favour of flowers.53 The issue of propriety – what is appropriate to station – that informed judgements concerning women’s paraphernalia is addressed by Lord Kames as part of his examination of taste and, in particular, of the power of objects to attract the eye. He associates the acquisition of superb and gorgeous things with an appetite for superiority and respect inflamed by riches.54 When he invited his friend, the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, to tell him what she thought about the science of ornament, she by no means shunned the principle of personal adornment but endeavoured to tie it to fitness and function, suggesting that if jewels appear to have some purpose, the wearer, whether male or female, will avoid the accusation of ostentation: It is certain that the great Artificer has conceal’d the useful under the beautiful. We perceive the beauty of every part of a minute animal immediately, it is obvious to some, but it is by reasoning we perceive its admirable fitness to its destination. In dress, I will allow, every ornament shd, if possible, appear of use, but this from reasons the Beholder seldom traces to their source. Too curious adorning of the Person makes a Man appear effeminate, a Woman Coquettish. Jewels seem most noble appropriated to some purpose because there is a littleness of mind in ostentatious parade. The regard they obtain from the beholder is chiefly as signs of wealth. A dress clasped or button’d with diamonds looks more noble than the same quantity of jewels placed as ornaments, because in the first place they seem limited merely by the use, in the other by fortune & intimate that ye persons wealth could not go any farther, besides, nothing expresses such affluence as when the richest and most elegant things administer to a Person’s ordinary occasions, & where there is no intended ostentation.55



mine.51 Dr John Fothergill, the Quaker physician, around the same time lamented that a Friend (i.e. a Quaker) named Nanny Greene

Figure 6 Queen Charlotte, engraved by Henry Meyer and published by Henry Colburn, 1818. London: Trustees of the British Museum.

As women lower down the social scale emulated fashions initiated at court, there arose widespread concern about the wearing of jewellery by improper persons. A case in point is the bracelet supporting a portrait miniature. The Queen and other women of quality are known to have worn miniatures of their husbands; these were not hidden but worn face outwards as part of their apparel. These ambulant portraits were re-presented in large-scale portraiture, suggesting allegiance to both fashion and a spouse who had almost total legal rights over a wife’s person but, equally, considerable financial obligation for her.56 The miniature portrait as royal jewellery possibly seen first mounted on a pearl bracelet in George Knapton’s portrait of the Princess of




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Wales, widow of George II, and her children is subsequently seen in many portraits of Queen Charlotte, consort of George III; in these portraits the King’s head is readily visible either on the Queen’s wrist or pinned to her bosom (Figure 6).57 Such was the popularity of jewellery like this that by 1766 it is observed that ‘The Ladies of Great Britain have done infinitely more for the professors of miniature painting, than the Society [of Artists of Great Britain] has done for all the branches of painting together, because by wearing bracelets, they have at once promoted the art and rewarded the labour of the artist’, but by 1777 the fashion was giving cause for concern, one writer remarking acidly on the appearance of ‘many a good Woman, whose arms are marked with an eternal red, from the industry of less prosperous days, [who] considers the Bracelet, with the Miniature-Painting, as an ornament necessary to her Station in Life’.58 Thus artefacts that had once communicated transcendent values – love, affection, devotion, loyalty, erotic desire – over distances of time and place ceased to have that capacity as they became debased by use in public by the lower classes on whose bodies ornament was less a prosthetic idealisation than an unpleasant reminder of the embodiment of bodies and their mundane histories. Encounters like this serve to demonstrate that it is in use – through the wearing, showing and re-presenting of artefacts – that they acquire their historical meanings – meanings which are shifting rather than stable and which inflect gender and class. It is perhaps in response to increasing social mobility and the democratisation of jewellery that popular etiquette books published in profusion began, from the early years of the nineteenth century, to spell out exactly in what situations women of different social classes and ages should acquire and wear jewellery. By mid-century women had begun to form the backbone of the labour market in mass-produced and popular jewellery (N. C. Reading & Co. Ltd of Birmingham opened in 1847 and by the 1880s had a staff of around 300, ‘mostly women and girls’).59 They had also become producers of jewellery at home: manuals gave advice on the equipment needed and the techniques for making jewellery from the hair of their loved ones, living or deceased, recommending that to make up the item oneself was the only way of ensuring that the precious bodily substance was not adulterated by a jeweller.60 The unwritten rules of jewellery ownership and wearing which girls in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had learned from female relatives and from emulation were now inscribed in popular manuals written largely by women. Mrs Merrifield advised in 1854 on ornament, under which she includes ‘bows of ribbon, artificial flowers, feathers, jewels, lace, fringes, and trimmings of all kinds’. Jewels are suitable for middle age but misplaced on youth, who should always be characterised by simplicity of apparel.61 Like Elizabeth Montagu a century earlier, she recommends that ornament should be appropriate and appear to answer some purpose – for example, a brooch should fasten some part of the dress.62 Whereas eighteenth-century



26


Notes 1 Strafford Papers, BM Add.MS 22, 256 (36). 2 For a discussion of stay buckles, see Marcia Pointon, ‘Jewellery in Eighteenthcentury England’, in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 120–46. 3 They will be explored more fully in my forthcoming book on jewels, jewellery and their images. 4 Seventeenth-century examples of images of infants wearing coral necklaces include Peter Paul Rubens’ drawing of his three-year-old son Nicolaas in the Albertina, Vienna, and Salomon de Bray’s portraits of his twins in their cradle in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. 5 For an interesting analysis of the uses of coral in connection with children and childbirth in the Italian Renaissance, see Jacqueline Musacchio, The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999). 6 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (Ware: Wordsworth, 1993), p. 189. 7 Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 332. 8 ‘My heart is yours. Keep it safely for me.’ Foreman, p. 8. 9 See Joan Evans, English Posies and Posy Rings (London: Oxford University Press/Humphrey Milman, 1931). 10 Foreman, p. 22. 11 As when Mary, wife of Admiral Howe, a woman memorably enshrined in Gainsborough’s portrait (c. 1765, The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House, London) received a pair of bracelets from the King in honour of her husband’s contribution to maritime safety (reproduced in Diana Scarisbrick, Jewellery in Britain, 1066–1837, Norwich: Michael Russell, 1994, pl. xxxv). 12 See Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 135–61. On the relative lack of attention by scholars to women’s spending and consumption, see Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Consumption and the Industrial Classes of Eighteenth-century England, Journal of Social History, 30:2 (1996): 415–34. 13 For details of these wills see Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing: Women Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture 1665–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), where they are quoted in full, pp. 319–21, 336–7. 14 ‘Roses’ and ‘brilliants’ are particular cuts of diamond; the three bows would have been set with diamonds and (possibly in diminishing sizes) worn on a corsage. 15 Delaval MSS. Northumberland County Record Office, 2 DE/31/10, 20(b). 16 MS. Winterthur Library, Wilmington, Delaware, col. 91. 17 See John Fleming, ‘Sir John Medina and his ‘Postures’, Connoisseur, 595 (August 1961): 23–4.



commentators often laughed at plain or older women laden with jewels,63 nineteenth-century regulatory discourse linked bodily and mental health with an avoidance of ornaments and insisted that, in Mrs Walker’s words, ‘jewels are fit only for the aged’.64

Marcia Pointon

18 Jane Cockburn to Lady Ann Strafford, c. 1735, British Library, Add. MS. 22, 256(33). There is no goldsmith or jeweller named Shanay in Ambrose Heal, The London Goldsmiths, 1200–1800: A Record of the Names and Addresses of the Craftsmen, their Shop-Signs and Trade Cards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935). On what ‘night earrings’ might mean, see Pointon, ‘Jewellery in Eighteenth-century England’. 19 See Kurz Tetzli von Rosador, ‘Gems and Jewellery in Victorian Fiction’, REAL, 2 (1984): 297–9 on Bess Cranage and Hetty Sorel in George Eliot’s Adam Bede, the one with ‘a pair of large round ear-rings with false garnets in them’, the other with jewellery made of ‘coloured glass and gilding’. 20 Mieke Bal, ‘Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting’, in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (London: Reaktion Books, 1994), p. 99. 21 John Ireland and John Nichols, Hogarth’s Works: with Life and Anecdotal Descriptions of his Pictures, 3rd series (London: n. pub., 1874), p. 145. A slightly variant version is quoted by Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: Volume III 1750–1764 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), p. 220. For a contextualised account of this painting, see Marcia Pointon, William Hogarth’s Sigismunda in Focus (London: Tate Publishing, 2000). 22 The painting contains a wealth of symbols, including an astrological clock suggestive of temporality, and a lap dog indicative of lust. 23 The writing is now difficult to read, but according to Charlemont, the greater part of the husband’s letter was not meant to be legible and what could be read was: ‘My dearest Charlotte, . . . your affectionate Townly. – I will send the remainder of the note [i.e. a cheque] by next post.’ See Paulson, pp. 220–1. 24 It is identified thus in Ireland and Nichols, p. 145n. There is some confusion in Paulson, p. 220, where he writes: ‘the note in the hat on the floor reads four hund[red].’ The note on the floor is illegible but the note in the hat, which is not on the floor, is as given above. 25 Alexander Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen & Co., 1963). For a similar pendant cross from this period in amethyst, see Hull Grundy collection, Kenwood House. 26 S. Hosmer, ‘Piquet, or, Virtue in Danger. Occasioned by Seeing a Picture of Mr. Hogarth’s (so called) at the Exhibition of the Society of Artists of Great Britain’, Lloyds Evening Post, 27–29 May 1761, p. 505. 27 I take this summary from Eve Tavor Bannet’s excellent study ‘The Marriage Act of 1753: “A Most Cruel Law for the Fair Sex”’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30:3 (1997): 233–54. 28 As proposed by Mary Peace, ‘The Figure of the Prostitute in Eighteenth-century Sentimental Discourse: Charity, Politeness and the Novel’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of York, 1995), p. 52. I am very grateful to Mary Peace for allowing me to read her thesis prior to publication. 29 Bannet, p. 235. 30 Quoted Foreman, pp. 104–5. 31 Quoted in M. Hart, ‘The Case of Paraphernalia’, Christie’s Bulletin, 3:iii (Autumn 1996): 2–3. 32 Signed J. Potter, 23 July 1743; attached is a list of jewels and a receipt for payment dated 2 September 1742 and signed Peter Webb. Delaval MS. Northumberland County Record Office, 2DE/31/10, 62. 33 Georgiana Cavendish, The Sylph, 3rd edition, 2 vols. (London, n. pub., 1783). 34 Cavendish, 2: 109–10. 35 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Miss Tichborne, 30 May 1760, in Robert Halsband The Life of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 265.



28

36 Christopher Pinchbeck died in 1732 and his business as a toymaker (a term that covered all kinds of small-scale luxury artefacts) was continued by his son Edward. 37 Manchester Magazine, 4 October 1746 (unpaginated). 38 The Oxford English Dictionary gives (2) ‘Contemptuously, as a type of what is counterfeit or spurious’ and (3b) ‘of deceptive appearance and small value’. 39 Anon., The Woman of Fashion. A Poem. In a Letter from Lady Maria Modish to Lady Belinda Artless (London: J. Bew, 1778), p. 23. 40 Frances Burney, Camilla (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 250. 41 Quoted in Forman, p. 17. 42 On the Duchess, see Frances Harris, A Passion for Government: the Life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), esp. pp. 268, 312. The list of the Duchess’s jewels with notes on where she obtained them and to whom she lent or gave them is in the British Library (BM Add. MS Althorp Papers D15(3). 43 William Blake, William Blake’s Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 2, p. 1453. 44 Mrs. Pendarves (later Delaney) to Mrs Anne Granville, 4 March 1728–29, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delaney, ed. Lady Llanover (London: R. Bentley, 1861), I, p. 191. 45 Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 25 February 1742, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis, 48 vols. (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937–80), XVII, p. 343. 46 Mrs Emily J. Climenson, Passages from the Diaries of Mrs. Philip Lybbe Powys (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1899), pp. 182–3 (‘four large bows making a complete stomacher, two of the same as sleeve knots, a superb necklace and earrings, her head almost cover’d, and a girdle of jewels, the ends hanging down a quarter of a yard’). 47 Quoted in Claude Blair, The Crown Jewels: the History of the Coronation Regalia in the Jewel House of the Tower of London (London: HM Stationery Office, 1998), p. 481. 48 For example, Lady Delaval was portrayed by William Bell of Newcastle c.1770 wearing an elaborate jewelled girdle to which no reference can be found in the Delaval archive, Northumberland County Record Office. The portrait is at Seaton Delaval Hall. 49 ‘To Mrs. Bishop on her wedding anniversary’, The Poetical Works of the Rev. Samuel Bishop, A.M., 2 vols. (London: A. Strahan, 1796), II, pp. 22–3. 50 For further discussion of objects such as the one described here, see Marcia Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England’, Art Bulletin, 83: 1 (2001): 48–71. 51 The Spectator, no. 631 (10 December 1714). For more on the relationship of Quakers to dress and ornament, see Marcia Pointon, ‘Quakerism and Visual Culture’, Art History, 20:3 (1997): 397–431. 52 John Fothergill to Israel Pemberton, Jr., 12–14 May 1743, B. C. Corner and C. C. Booth, Chain of Friendship. Selected Letters of Dr. John Fothergill of London 1735–1780 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 75. 53 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (London: Everyman, 1993), p. 351. 54 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (New York: Prior and Dainning, 1819), p. 370 (dedicated to the King 1761, preface to 3rd edition, June 1763). 55 Elizabeth Montagu to Lord Kames, 13 April 1767, Huntington Library MS. MO1175 A&B. 56 See Staves and Bannet. 57 The Knapton portrait is in the Royal Collection. For the portraits of Queen Charlotte, see Marcia Pointon, ‘Intriguing Jewellery: Royal Bodies and Luxurious




58 59 60

61 62 63 64

Marcia Pointon Consumption’, Textual Practice, 11: 3 (1997): 494–516. For a more detailed discussion of this type of jewellery, see Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”’. [William Combe], A Poetical Epistle to Sir Joshua Reynolds (London: Fielding and Walker, 1777), Introduction. The Centenary of N. C. Reading & Co. Ltd 1847–1947, Birmingham Public Library, P.67.13 589877. See Marcia Pointon, ‘Wearing Memory: Mourning, Jewellery and the Body’, in Trauer Tragen–Trauer Zeigen. Inszenierungen der Geschlechter, ed. Gisela Ecker (Munich: Fink Verlag, 1999) pp. 65–81. Mrs Merrifield, Dress as a Fine Art (Boston: J. Jewett & Co., 1854), p. 95. Merrifield, p. 96. See, for example, Climensen, p. 152. Mrs A. Walker, Female Beauty as Preserved and Improved by Regimen, Cleanliness and Dress (New York: Scofield and Voorhies, 1840), p. 366. Advice by Sir Anthony Carlisle.



30

Fanny’s Pockets: Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy, 1780–1850 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White

The pockets at the centre of this essay are tie-on pockets that belonged to one woman, named Fanny Jarvis, who lived during the early nineteenth century. Fanny Jarvis’s pockets are typical of the tie-on pocket as a form. They are large, discrete garments of a more or less rectangular or oblong shape, designed to be tied around the waist, over a petticoat and under a dress. Each has an opening running vertically down the front for the hand to access. The pockets are also typical in their construction, being pieced together from various textiles, in this case sturdy ribbed cotton.1 These can be considered the generic features of the tie-on pocket as a form, and to this extent Fanny Jarvis’s pockets are unexceptional. Fanny’s pockets also shared their size with the form in general. Tie-on pockets were immense, certainly by comparison with the sewn-in alternatives that emerged and became increasingly dominant during the nineteenth century. Most commonly, they were between 30 and 40 cm in length. Women could keep a dazzling array of items in such large spaces. The records of trials for pickpocketing offences against women at the Old Bailey in the eighteenth century give us such items as coins, bills of exchange, trade tokens, fashion accessories such as gloves, jewellery, watches, buttons, earrings and mirrors, sewing equipment such as scissors, needles, thimbles and penknives, eating utensils such as spoons and knives, as well as implements for negotiating the urban environment such as keys, purses and letters of testament.2 Women’s letters and diaries and literary records reveal that they were used for carrying letters from friends and lovers, while more opaque and intriguing was the practice of deliberately concealing pockets within the structure of houses. One of two pockets found concealed in houses in Oxfordshire contained coins and trade tokens from a period of over 100 years, as well as a letter, receipts, some hops and a baby’s cap.3 The tie-on pocket as a cultural form is obscure to us now. While residual traces of its presence can still be found in the material culture of some rural communities, the pocket in its ‘pure’ form no longer exists. However, it is clear from other sources that such pockets could become significant to women. Perhaps 31



2

Barbara Burman and Jonathan White

the best example is the didactic novel Grandmamma’s Pockets, published in 1849. As we will see in more detail later, Grandmamma’s Pockets was a novel of a child’s education which articulated its message through the metaphorical power of a pair of tie-on pockets. A flighty young girl is made to learn habits of economy in order to control her industrious but careless tendencies. This message is embodied in a beloved grandmother’s pockets. ‘Her grandmamma made a decided distinction between these large receptacles. The right-hand pocket might be considered an active member of society – a positive fountain, pouring forth what was wanted: the left-hand pocket, on the contrary, was a reservoir wherein everything was preserved. One typified the spirit of activity, the other that of carefulness. “I should be in a state of confusion without my two pockets,” the old lady would say. “What I wanted to preserve, would get confused with what I wanted to use; and as I have told you my dear leetle granddaughter, no matter how we realise; unless we preserve, we shall neither be useful nor rich”.4 Thus, we can see the potential symbolic power of pockets. Evidently, they could contain and carry plenty of meaning. Yet how do we analyse these meanings? Is the range of meanings that could be embedded in women’s tie-on pockets available simply through analysis of texts like these? More broadly, what does the analysis and interpretation of material culture commit scholars to doing? This essay is, in part, a preliminary report on an aspect of our research into these questions. It suggests some provisional conclusions that indicate the meanings that could be carried in Fanny Jarvis’s pockets and how they might reflect women’s positions in 1820s Britain. It is also partly a methodological exercise, intended to suggest the benefits of a methodology that draws on a full range of techniques and approaches from the emerging field of material culture studies.5 In the process, we hope to demonstrate the interdependence of textual, visual and material culture and argue for an inclusive social history based on genuine dialogue between what have been separate disciplines with their own discrete fields. The history of these objects and the social worlds within which they were produced and used, it is argued, requires a thoroughly interdisciplinary inquiry which can draw on histories of technology, trade, business and broader processes of socio-economic change, alongside a newer attention to the material properties of objects and a similar recognition of the importance of literary and visual culture records and methods. This essay is also intended as a corrective to certain dress history narratives, which have suggested that fashion was the overriding determinant of change, with developing dress styles leading to the disappearance of pockets or their relegation into ‘underwear’.6 We aim to complicate the story and to place this form of pocket into a more complex social world, seeing its changing material properties, social uses and meanings as both expressions of broader change and at the same time as carrying its particular narrative of development. We hope also to contribute to a richer history of the consumption of textiles, shedding light on the meanings of different textiles and the choices made by



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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 33

*** One of the chief obstacles in undertaking a material culture analysis of Fanny Jarvis’s pockets is that we do not know who she was. Fanny’s pockets are in the Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall in Manchester, where they were deposited by the Cunningtons, pioneering collectors and writers on dress history. They survive without any provenance at all. Perhaps there never was any. However, it is possibly because the Cunningtons were famously more concerned to move away from a biographical approach that remained concerned with the clothing of élite men and women in favour of studying clothing as an expression of broader social trends at work among the mass of the people.7 While the absence of any firm sense of Fanny’s social status and geographical location makes analysis at the desired level of specificity impossible, Fanny’s pockets are still full of history. The surviving objects in British museum collections demonstrate the wide variety that existed within the broad form of the tie-on pocket.8 Pockets could be embroidered, made as patchwork, knitted or pieced together from plain textiles. They could be made from almost any textile, from rough canvas and stout Holland linens, to fine cottons and even silks. Fanny Jarvis’s pockets are perhaps the plainest of all: they are one of a large sub-type of plain, white cotton pockets (Figure 7). Four tie-on pockets are identified as belonging to Fanny Jarvis by her name or initials and dates written on the back in black ink. From these inscriptions, one of the pockets is from 1821, two from 1824 and the fourth carries no date (Figure 8). Three share very similar shape and dimensions, with a width at the top of 15–17 cm and straight or shallow curved edges widening out to a straight base of 32.7–34.5 cm. The fourth pocket has a far narrower top and a markedly more curved design, widening out to a gently curved base of 30 cm. All the pockets are between 51 and 54 cm in length. Despite their slightly different shapes, the pockets are made to a basically identical design, which they share with most surviving pockets. However, in terms of both textile components used and the technical skill embedded in them, Fanny Jarvis’s pockets are of a consistently higher standard than many of their contemporaries and most of the older pockets. The pockets have been strengthened around the top where the ties are attached, and around the sides and bottom of the opening, all points of stress when they were worn and used. The seams are neat and strong and the needlework skilful, with small, close stitches. Three of the pockets are made in the main from a form of dimity cotton, a white striped twill weave cotton textile of some complexity and



consumers. Acts of consumption and choices of textiles and clothing, like changing fashions, need to be part of a far broader social history. This must embrace changing economic systems, with their effects on production, distribution and consumption, and changing class and gender positions and identities.


Figure 7 A white cotton corded dimity pocket belonging to Fanny Jarvis. Like the other cotton items associated with her, it is very finely sewn. MCAG.1947.1252. © Manchester City Galleries/Gallery of Costume.

robustness. Throughout, the design, construction and materials show that Fanny’s pockets were made with strength and durability in mind. The data arising from such close object analysis gain additional significance when understood in relation to the ‘life-cycle’ of these objects as they moved between sets of human social relationships, from their production, through their distribution and use and the meanings that accrued to them over time. *** Perhaps the most visible feature of these pockets is their plainness: they are entirely undecorated. From the late seventeenth to the later eighteenth century, it was common for women to embroider or decorate their pockets in some way.



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Figure 8 Fanny Jarvis’s name and the year in indelible marking ink on the back of her pocket. The number may have indicated it was part of a larger set. MCAG.1947.1252. © Manchester City Galleries/Gallery of Costume.

An array of techniques could be used, from patchwork and quilting to crewelwork and other embroidered designs, often incorporating birds and flowers or fine, meandering vermicular patterns. Like samplers, they appear to have formed part of a young girl’s education. In a personal memoir written in 1836, Charlotte Paperdiek described how the young Princess Charlotte ‘could stitch a pocket, she read prettily, and now began to write’. In Grandmamma’s Pockets, the young Annie states that she ‘learned to backstitch’ on her mother’s pockets.9 Several surviving pockets resemble samplers, carrying inscriptions, names and dates with embroidered designs.10 Unlike samplers, however, many of the embroidered pockets appear not to have been straightforward exercises in discipline, but could be worked with a wide range of motifs, with a freedom unfamiliar to sampler work. They could also be added to later and further embellished by later hands. The history of embroidering pockets, like the history of embroidery more widely, is a rich, complex and multilayered narrative with its own dynamics that demands more analysis. Here, it will suffice to note that Fanny’s pockets embody a trend away from embroidering and towards the construction of plain pockets. Embroidered pockets therefore achieve some unity by the simple fact of their increasing absence from the historical record. For instance, in a sample of 143 tie-on pockets in British museum collections, we found that 125 had





been dated by museum curators, of which only 33 were embroidered and only six dated to any time after 1800. So, the surviving archive reinforces the impression that by Fanny Jarvis’s time, women were no longer embroidering their pockets.11 Given the emphasis placed on embroidery as a form of female production that was historically contested in relation to the changing position of women in a rapidly changing economic system, it would be easy to see the trend towards plain pockets as a process of ‘emptying’. Could plain white cotton pockets carry the same richness of meaning and significance as a painstakingly embroidered pocket? Certainly women’s relationship as producers to their pockets and to the practice of embroidery was changing in relation to the boom in the availability of textiles during the eighteenth century. Embroidery of clothing did not disappear, but became increasingly marginalised, sometimes literally.12 The rapid development of the production, distribution and consumption of textiles, both imported and manufactured, was paralleled by the growth of a market in ready-made pockets. Trade cards from London and stock inventories of linen drapers, haberdashers and milliners demonstrate that alongside the impressive array of textiles, ready-made garments and accessories, it was increasingly possible to have tie-on pockets made up commercially and to purchase them ready-made as early as the middle of the eighteenth century. Morgan’s haberdashery, based in the Strand, London, opposite Somerset House, sold ‘Women’s Pockets’ alongside caps, purses, ribbons, garters and handkerchiefs. Robert Blunt was the proprietor of a ready-made Linen Warehouse in Charing Cross, London, during the second half of the eighteenth century and among his stock his trade card offered ‘Pockets, the Needlework elegantly performed’, alongside ‘Shirts and Shifts, Made in the Neatest Manner of fine Holland or Irish Cloth, Plain and Ruffled Ladies Fine Dimity Coats’. In 1789, Blunt advertised in The Times, offering ‘shirts and shifts of Holland, Callico of Irish Cloth, Ladies Dimity Petticoats, Pockets, &c, Sheeting, Table and all kinds of Household Linen for Families or Gentlemen going abroad’. It was not only linen drapers who offered ready-made pockets. The stock inventory of a millinery business based in York, made in 1783, lists among the manifold ribbons, gloves, hats and other accessories, no fewer than 21 pairs of pockets.13 Without embroidery, even home-produced tie-on pockets simply came to embody less labour time and a different, in some ways narrower, range of needle skills. It is not entirely clear whether Fanny Jarvis’s pockets were home-made or ready-made, although given their shape and minor idiosyncrasies, it is more likely to have been the former. They may not be embroidered, but it is significant that the skills used to make Fanny’s pockets were of a high quality. The cutting involved shows a care and precision less evident in the eighteenthcentury home-produced pockets. The needlework is also uniformly neat and suggests that Fanny possessed good quality tools. Fanny’s pockets were made at a time of heightened interest in educating women, especially middle- and working-class women, in needlework and garment making skills. As Janet



36

Arnold has shown, from the late 1780s, there was an increase in the publication of books and magazines that laid out patterns and instructions in the making up of basic garments. Instructing middle- and working-class women in the needle skills to make up caps, petticoats, nightgowns and shirts, it was argued, would save on the expense of sending out cloth to dressmakers, enabling women to spend their money more carefully and wisely. During the 1830s in particular, we find pockets appearing in this literature, most notably in The Workwoman’s Guide, which included plates illustrating how to draw and cut out as well as explanatory text.14 The development of this educational literature closely followed the boom in the textile market from 1780 to 1830, particularly in cottons. The growth of the quantity and range of cotton textiles produced in Britain, and imported, entailed a significant expansion in the range of options facing the consumer. By the 1780s, this included brightly coloured printed chintzes and woven checks and stripes, alongside a range of fustians, embracing manifold types of designs. Cotton manufacturers aggressively marketed their proliferating range of products as alternatives to, and improvement on, not only colourful and luxurious silks, but also a wide range of linen goods for clothing and households.15 The surviving pockets reinforce this narrative. From our sample of British tie-on pockets, 34 were dated by curators to the eighteenth century and only four of these were chiefly made from cotton. By contrast, out of the 94 pockets that had been dated to the nineteenth century, 50 were chiefly made from cotton. But why did women make or buy pockets made from ‘plain’ white cotton? The answer lies in the complex changes and developments in fashion, clothing systems and domestic furnishing practices, particularly from the 1780s to the 1820s. Dress history suggests that the fate of women’s tie-on pockets was sealed by the advent in the 1790s of translucent and body-hugging neoclassical dresses whose flimsy drape and demeanour would be marred by large or bulky pockets. This account of change has the new bags called reticules, and also known as ‘ridicules’, replacing tie-on pockets until they were revived in the 1820s, accommodated more easily again as fashionable waists began their slow descent to a more natural level, skirts widened and stronger, more opaque dress fabrics returned to favour. However, it seems implausible that all users of capacious pockets replaced them with reticules. There is no certain way of gauging the percentage of women who adopted the more extreme neoclassical dress, nor if individual women adopted it to the complete exclusion of other, more conservative clothing. Consumers faced with new fashions offering extreme and even unsettling styles are likely to approach them with varying degrees of enthusiasm or vacillation. Likewise, factors such as generation and social class point to divergence and difference in clothing consumption habits and practices, making it unwise to argue that the long-standing form of pocket disappeared at this time. On the contrary, there is visual and material evidence confirming its continual use.





The dresses in the Snowshill collection suggest that it was possible to combine attention to neoclassical fashionable design, with its emphasis on high waistlines and straight lines, with the continued wearing of pockets. Also, the open style of dress that became fashionable in the early 1800s obviated the need for pocket openings as it could be left open at the side, allowing access to pockets worn beneath.16 Visual evidence also supports the continued use of pockets. E. F. Burney’s satirical print The Waltz, published c. 1815 (Figure 9), is a satire on the fashion for the waltz and the supposed immorality occasioned by this new dance. The pockets on the floor in the centre and that worn by the girl having her dress repaired (on the left) are suggestive of the moral disorder that governs the scene as a whole. Indeed, in many ways the pocket became relatively culturally visible at just this time. For example, the developing tradition of rural genre painting in the early years of the nineeenth century showcased the careful observation of the lives and environments of the rural working class.

Figure 9 ‘The Waltz’ c. 1815. E. F. Burney. Pen-and-ink and watercolour 47.5 ⫻ 68.6 cm. In a crowded assembly room, filled with texts containing ironic commentary and jokes, the dancers attempt the new waltz. In the centre foreground a pair of fallen pockets spill out peppermints, lip salve, orris rouge and coins. On the left, a downcast young girl has her torn dress mended and reveals her tie-on pocket with a paper identifying her as ‘Miss Doll Bumple’. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum.



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Pockets appear frequently in the dress of working-class women in the paintings of artists such as Thomas Webster and William Mulready.17 Finally, there is the evidence of the pockets themselves. Fanny Jarvis’s pockets are substantially longer than most of the eighteenth-century pockets. Their average length is 52 cm, 10–20 cm longer than most eighteenth-century pockets. When worn high under the bust, this would have made them large and long enough to be compatible with the dresses of the period in which they were made. Tie-on pockets, then, were adaptable to the strictures of fashion. They might have become unfashionable in themselves, replaced or ‘driven underground’ by an expanding range of highly ornamental bags for polite society, but they did not disappear. Rather, they were reshaped to fit in with the fashions of the day. But they did not simply survive fashion. We should turn this view on its head, and see that neoclassical fashion itself was part of a broader and more profound set of social changes, and these deeper processes also impacted on the making, using and meaning of these pockets. Once we do this, another element of the supposedly ‘plain’ appearance of Fanny’s pockets becomes more problematic: their colour. Why were Fanny’s pockets, like so many of those of her contemporaries in the first half of the nineteenth century, white? Michael Snodin sees the period’s affective relationship with whiteness as symptomatic of a fashion for demonstrating a higher moral seriousness than earlier fashions.18 We should perhaps place this in the broader context of the encroaching influence of a developing bourgeois ideology which placed the household – a particular sphere of material and affective relationships –increasingly construed as private, in opposition to the mesh of commercial exchanges that constituted ‘civil society’. Daniel Roche has perceptively connected this to the emergence and development of the concept of ‘household linen’. Roche shows that inventories demonstrate a growth in the quantity of household and body linen in French households and a process of specialisation with new garments emerging in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to stimulate and satisfy new needs. He argues that linen became a crucial site for ‘materialising’ ideas about cleanliness, respectability and restraint. Thus, the purchasing of ‘linen’ goods became a way of articulating a new need to demonstrate cleanliness through whiteness, as well as a way of showing the power to possess white goods. This fuelled the competition to develop new ways of making and keeping textiles white, or making a more perfect white.19 Cottons represented a new stage in the pursuit of whiteness and the capacity to signify cleanliness, health and respectability. In 1833, Edward Baines argued that cotton’s natural properties, combined with innovations in the chemistry of bleaching, made it superior to linen. With cotton, it was possible for the first time to make a cloth ‘perfectly white’. For Baines, cotton was also superior to linen in its fitness for both cold and warm climates and its ability to prevent chills. Its fibres, he claimed, absorbed better and allowed the skin to breathe more than linen. Contemporary commentators repeatedly emphasised cotton’s





fitness for expressing cleanliness through its ability to bear repeated washing. Unlike linens, cottons, it was claimed, had ‘a new and fresh appearance after every wash’.20 Cotton’s cheapness from the 1780s allowed such commentators and industrial advocates to claim that the benefits of cotton clothing and its healthy, clean properties were available to ever greater numbers of the population. In 1805 David McPherson claimed that ‘women of all ranks, from the highest to the lowest’ were ‘clothed in cotton’.21 The choice of white cotton was not, therefore, a simple renunciation of colour or even a repression of dirt, but the expression of a set of increasingly hegemonic ideas about the demonstration of decency and cleanliness through the purchase of a range of new, relatively cheap and aggressively marketed textile goods for adorning house and body. These ideas were not born with cotton, but they were far easier to develop and inculcate, and would have been far more popular, once they did not require the relative austerity of coarser linens. By the period 1780–1820, it was possible to express the ideology of cleanliness and decency by purchasing household linen and making and buying underwear garments in greater quantities of a greater range of increasingly durable and well-made cotton textiles. The cotton textile from which three of Fanny Jarvis’s pockets are made was a key part of this process. The ribbed weave twill textile that forms the main body of the pockets was one of an increasingly huge range of dimity textiles cheaply available. Dimities were characterised by a patterned weave structure of diapers or, more commonly, of stripes or ribs of varying widths. Dimities could be made from linen or cotton, and over the course of the eighteenth century they appear to have been made overwhelmingly from the former. However, by the 1780s and early nineteenth century, a widening range of cotton dimities became available to consumers. Their combination of robustness and relative cheapness derived from their complex yet relatively easy to weave structure.22 During the 1760s and 1770s, dimity weavers were among the lowest paid of the cotton textile weavers – lower than the check weavers and far lower than other skilled handicrafts.23 The relatively low production costs combined with a hardy weave structure made them more robust and yet cheaper than the lower grades of linen. Dimity rapidly became a popular choice for adorning domestic furnishings, particularly in the bedroom. In the late eighteenth century, the upholsterers George and Alice Hepplewhite wrote that white dimities were ‘peculiarly applicable’ to bed hangings, ‘producing an effect of elegance and neatness truly applicable’. Advertisements for auctions of house contents in The Times during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries show that dimities were the textile of choice for the bed furnishings of the middle classes and the urban genteel. In 1838, The Workwoman’s Guide suggested that dimities were particularly suited to the range of cloths necessary for a respectable household of the middle or working classes.24



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But dimities were also becoming increasingly popular in clothing and what was called ‘body linen’. The records of thefts of clothing in Old Bailey trials show that, particularly after 1780, dimity was used for a huge array of clothing, including bed gowns, breeches, children’s clothing, jackets, nightcaps, stays, stomachers and, most commonly certainly among these more easily portable items, waistcoats and petticoats. The Lady’s Economical Assistant of 1808 recommended that dimity would be suitable for petticoats for women, and stays and petticoats for infant girls.25 By the time The Workwoman’s Guide was first published in 1838, besides pockets, dimity was recommended for making watch pockets, petticoats, lining baby’s baskets or infants cots and children’s nightgowns.26 Dimity came to cover and to embody the increasingly textilerich domestic sphere and its burgeoning ‘linen’ regime. Dimity might be seen to be heavily invested with the ideas of domestic decency and economy that were being expressed through the household and its occupants. This association also helps to explain why Fanny might have had so many pockets. As well as being signed and dated, one of Fanny’s pockets is numbered ‘9’, implying that she owned at the very least this number. It was certainly not new to own several pockets or pairs of pockets. The records of burglaries tried at the Old Bailey reveal London women losing multiple pockets among their sets of petticoats, stays, caps, stomachers, gowns and sheets, sometimes as many as six.27 Yet it is clear that with the expansion of household and body linen, the ownership and marking of sets of items was becoming more important. The Workwoman’s Guide, for example, urged that families should ensure that they had a good stock of sheets and other household linens, all of them marked clearly, preferably in ink, with letters and numbers. Given the expense and inconvenience of washing, only a good stock could enable a household to avoid having to wash their clothes more often than fortnightly, while only marking them in the manner described could enable the head of the household to keep track of their linen.28 We can see this in practice at an individual micro-level in Mary Waller’s apparel inventory, which shows that a very high percentage of her clothing consisted of white body linen. In addition, Mary Waller owned multiple items among these white garments, including ten white petticoats, eleven chemises, seventeen caps and, notably, seven pairs of pockets.29 One of the few things we know about Fanny Jarvis herself is that, besides her pockets, her marking system suggests she owned at least seventeen nightdresses, six caps and perhaps a dozen chemises.30 Our research indicates that the practice of owning sets of pockets and hand-writing names, dates and numbers on them was fairly widespread. In addition, our findings to date suggest that this was most common during the period 1820–80.31 In the way they were made, the materials from which they were constructed, their form and design, their marking and their relationship with the fashion systems and domestic regimes in which they were embedded, Fanny Jarvis’s pockets appear to be immersed in the particular form of domestic ideology that had developed by the early nineteenth century. The period 1780–1850





saw the flowering of what might be called the ‘literature of domestic economy’. This genre emerged during the eighteenth century as guidebooks to the developing manners and mores of ‘middling-sort’ domestic conduct, the ‘private’ counterpart to the literature on polite conduct in civil society. A response to the development of a market economy and a civil society built on commercial exchanges, the literature of domestic economy emerged as a means of shaping and regulating the conduct of domestic relations and practices that were increasingly becoming defined as ‘private’, outside the sphere of law and public authority. Its essential ‘work’ might be seen as licensing and policing the boundaries of consumer choice, mediated by concepts of ‘taste’ or ‘decency’, coupled with the economy that was necessary to avoid debt and destitution. It was a literature that was forged for the task of enabling ‘tasteful’ or decent consumption, however defined, for the middle classes, while avoiding luxury and the debtors’ gaol, but it was also a literature that could easily be adapted into a set of didactic principles for inculcating into the working class. It was, almost uniformly, aimed at women – mostly middle-class women – who had responsibilities for households and training servants.32 By the early nineteenth century, this literature had undergone a qualitative shift. Not only was it proliferating in print culture of the period, it was also comprehensively more detailed, seeking to regulate the minutiae of daily life. Responding to the development of ever-more complex markets in commodities of every kind, this literature demonstrates the concern to embrace and regulate the whole spectrum of domestic duties, including cooking, cleaning, furnishing, employing servants, educating children and clothing the household. These books and magazines strove to develop what was in essence a sophisticated science of domestic life for consumers trying to negotiate an increasingly complex market. The books laid down rules for how to demonstrate decency best without false economies, how to recognise quality while keeping to the strictures of economy, how to avoid being cheated and how to avoid buying unnecessarily.33 The Workwoman’s Guide, The Lady’s Economical Assistant and Cottage Comforts should be viewed as part of this broader literature, itself an expression of the changes that were shaping the meaning of Fanny’s pockets. They gave detailed advice on how to cut out and construct simple items of apparel to avoid using dressmakers more than was necessary. They gave instructions on how to mend and maintain clothes so as to preserve them as long as possible.34 In the context of the expanding choice of textiles available, they laid down rules of thumb for discriminating between the potentially dizzying array of possibilities, specifying which textiles were best for which functions and negotiating the dangers of fraudulent tradesmen selling the consumer inferior goods.35 Clothes were also to be ordered and maintained in ways that reflected the importance of specialisation, of accounting and of maintaining a clean, economical regime. There were instructions for folding and storing clothes of different textiles and for how to organise drawers and cupboards, especially linen cupboards. There were instructions on how to wash, how often to wash and for getting



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stains out of different fabrics.36 It is in the context of the flowering of this literature at the social and economic conjuncture of the 1820s that we can begin to pull together all the threads of Fanny Jarvis’s pockets and see them as filled with meaning. An expanding and aggressively promoted trade in cotton textiles was able to exploit and develop the taste for cottons in clothing and in household linen. Cotton was invading the domestic sphere. In addition, the sphere of household and body linen or underwear was itself expanding. By the 1780s, manufacturers were able to produce and market a range of different textiles to fill a domestic sphere that was itself becoming more specialised and differentiated. Both domestic and body ‘linen’ were proliferating, generating new goods and helping to create new needs on the basis of the convenience, comfort and cheapness of cotton textiles. By the early 1800s, for example, chemises, stays and petticoats could increasingly be supplemented by drawers.37 As a consequence, both the body and the home were becoming more complex loci of consumer activity, particularly women’s consumer activity, which required disciplining and regulating. The literature of domestic economy was one expression of this, creating a science of everyday life that could project the hegemonic values of decency, cleanliness and economy into the sphere of female governance, into the home and over the body, to educate the female consumer. It projected these values through inculcating the taste for white goods, through encouraging the manufacture of basic items of clothing, through the ability to distinguish various types of cotton and linen and assign them to their proper place and function, and through the proper storing and maintenance of clothing and household linen. In all of these facets of their materiality, Fanny’s pockets can be seen to materialise these ideas and to signify adherence to and internalisation of the developing bourgeois ideology of domesticity and its coalescing gender roles as they were expressed in the conditions of the 1820s. Reflecting back on Grandmamma’s Pockets, one can see the association between tie-on pockets and a highly formulated ideology in which women were expected to develop and reproduce themselves as managers of their domestic economies. Anna Maria Hall’s novel was a didactic work intended to educate women in the need to cultivate order in their domestic lives and to regulate and direct their various domestic labours. It sits firmly in the tradition of works extolling the virtues of the work ethic in the private sphere of domestic life. Nothing embodies the mental labour involved in organising domestic labour as well as the grandmother’s pockets. As we saw at the beginning, the grandmother repeatedly intones that her pair of pockets organises her life. The left and the right embody the different spirits of industry and order, beneficence and thrift. Grandmamma’s pockets are doing more than at first appears to be the case and their material properties are a clue to what this work might be. The grandmother owns several pairs of pockets: an embroidered or decorated satin pair for special occasions such as festivals, a pair of hand-quilted pockets, and her





everyday pockets. These, the ‘heroes’ of the novel, are described as being ‘quilted’, in a manner resembling ‘what servants call a “Marcella” quilt’.38 Originally, Marseilles was a form of hand quilting carried out on white linens and cottons and which took its name from the town in France most famous for its production. These were imported as expensive luxuries during the eighteenth century and by 1783 proved popular enough to prompt the Society for the Encouragement of Arts Manufactures and Commerce to offer a premium to anyone able to develop a way of imitating them well. In the 1780s, this had succeeded to the point where there was an established manufacture of ‘marseilles’ or ‘marcella’, mostly based in Lancashire. In design, ‘marcellas’ were often, though not always, white, often linen, but increasingly cotton and sported complex geometrical and floral designs, similar to those of the famous white Bolton coverlets or counterpanes.39 By the 1790s, ‘marcella’ was fairly well dispersed in the urban population at least. Like dimity, it was widely used for petticoats and waistcoats, as well as bed gowns and quilts. And, like dimity, ‘marcella’ was robust, had a woven pattern, was white and was washable. Yet ‘marcella’ was more complicated to manufacture than dimity, and correspondingly more expensive.40 Anna Maria Hall’s choice of ‘marcella’ over dimity reflects the conservative cultural politics that suffuse the novel. Hall’s novel is full of oppositions between actions and objects that embody the flighty, insubstantial and transitory tendencies of the fashionable world and the real, substantial qualities that emanate from a world firmly rooted.41 The choice of ‘marcella’ for the pockets echoes this. The pockets are ‘majestic’, ‘so broad, and deep, and long and strong, nothing flimsy about them, quilted into a stiff border of erect vine leaves, with a still stiffer flowerpot in the middle’. But they are also ingenious, embedded with skilled labour. By contrast, the mother’s dimity pockets are ‘just plain dimity, trimmed with muslin’ and worthy of no more comment, almost as though they are aligned with the transitory goods of fashion. The message seems to be that dimity cannot quite do the work that Hall wants her textile to do.42 In the 1840s, precisely because of its adaptability and versatility, precisely because of its success in colonising the domestic sphere and the body, dimity had become too ‘everyday’, too associated with the rich diversity of fabrics available to a mass consumer base, to do what Hall asks of them. This is supported by the literature of the period, in which dimity had become associated with common simplicity, a familiar feature of humble, even impoverished domesticity.43 ‘Marcella’ by contrast is both more physically and culturally robust. It can be loaded with even more meaning. ‘Marcella’ enables Hall to articulate the importance of history through its material properties. Woven ‘quilted’ textiles carry their own history within their form in an especially vivid way because they are a mechanical imitation of a skilled, hand-stitching process and therefore also contain references to past luxury within their form. In the floral designs that cover the surfaces of ‘marcellas’, these textiles also carry the memory of the vibrant embroideries that once decorated petticoats and, most



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pertinently, pockets, directly imitating the common conventional design in which flowers climb from a central stem or vase, rising either side of the opening (Figure 10).44 ‘Marcella’, then, is a complex and richly historical textile: at one and the same time it points forward and backward. Its complexity and mechanisation allow it to be endowed with the bourgeois virtues of industriousness and ingenuity, aligning it with the dominant values of modern capitalist societies, while its form and design point back to older practices and associations which serve to reproach the inherent tendency toward fashion-driven consumption and manners. ‘Marcella’ is the material equivalent of grandmamma: white, unembroidered, clean and decent, fitting neatly into the aesthetic politics of domestic economy, but at the same time ‘old-fashioned’, strong and sturdy, anti-fashion. Here we also enter a place where the novel can suggest things about tie-on pockets that cannot be learned as well elsewhere. Grandmamma’s pockets are located in the past. The historical work they do is not simply embedded in the material properties of the pockets, but also in their function. While the

Figure 10 The embroidery in wool on this pair of linen pockets includes the initials ‘G O’ and the year 1774. The free-flowing flowers, stems and leaves arising from a common central base and decorative edging round the opening were common motifs on eighteenth-century pockets. They were echoed in the woven patterns on ‘Marseilles’ or ‘marcella’ ready-made pockets fronts. MCAG. 1951.107. © Manchester City Galleries/ Gallery of Costume.





Figure 11 Two panels of swatches reveal the rich variety of cotton goods available for use in the later eighteenth century. Thomas Smith. Manchester pattern book. Manchester, England. 1783. Courtesy, The Winterthur Library; Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera.

pockets embody care and order in ways that closely echo the literature of domestic economy, as the choice of ‘marcella’ shows, they also do more than this. They are containers of history and memory. During the grandmother’s convalescence, she amuses Annie with a story spun from an old leather case with a medal that was won by her own father, carried around in her pockets.45 The contents can also be deposits of memory and personal history, evoking past times and peoples who are remembered through a romanticist relationship with the past. Inside a message that is very apparently one of domestic economy is contained a lesser message that partly reinforces and partly pulls away from the former: a message about the importance of family, lineage and memory as ways of anchoring a specifically female identity in the modern world. This complexity brings us back to the methodological purpose of the article. We have seen how Fanny’s pockets, like the grandmother’s, are densely historical objects, carrying within them meanings that embody particular complexes of ideas arising from women’s positions in the period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Uncovering these histories requires that scholars of material culture deploy the full range of social historical techniques: the skills



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Figure 12 Woven to shape commercially in white cotton in imitation of the highly prized Marseilles or ‘marcella’ hand quilting, the pattern and its disposition on this pocket front also echo those found on eighteenth-century embroidered pockets. There are several extant pockets with woven ‘marcella’ fronts identical to this one that reveal individual differences in the way they were cut, assembled and marked. This pocket is distinguished by its gathered top and the initials ‘M T’ stitched on the back. CRH 1973.16. Hampshire County Museums and Archives Service.

of the curator, the social historian and the analysts of literary and visual records must somehow be combined. Without the close attention to their material properties, we would not have seen beneath the everyday plainness of either Fanny’s dimity pockets or understood the full cultural labour of Hall’s ‘marcella’ pockets. Without sensitive analysis of the novel’s internal workings, we might not have seen the full range of meanings that could be carried by tie-on pockets.

Notes 1 Fanny Jarvis’s pockets are at the Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall, Manchester, with the following accession numbers: MCAG.1947.1252, MCAG.1947.1253.A, MCAG.1947.1253.B, MCAG.1947.1254.





2 See, for example, Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, 29 October 2003), January 1725, Trial of Edward Johnson (t17250115-2); OBP, February 1770, Francis Unwin (t17700221-30); OBP, December 1766, Mary M’Cormack (T17661217-34). 3 OXCMS.1997.7.1. See the report by conservators at the Textile Conservation Centre, Winchester School of Art, in A. Harrison and K. Gill, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Detachable Pocket and Baby’s Cap, Found Concealed in a Wall Cavity: Conservation and Research’, Textile History, 33:2 (2002): 177–94. This pocket can be seen on the website of the AHRC Deliberately Concealed Garments Project, based at the Textile Conservation Centre, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. See www.concealedgarments.org. 4 Anna Maria Hall, Grandmamma’s Pockets (Edinburgh: William and Robert Chambers, 1849), pp. 38–9. 5 For example, Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, eds., Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999); Daniel Miller, ed., Material Cultures: Why Some Things Matter (London: UCL Press, 1998); Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal. The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection (New Haven, CT: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation with Yale University Press, 2002);Giorgio Riello, ‘La chaussure à la mode: Production Innovation and Marketing Practices in Parisian and London Boot and Shoemaking in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Textile History, 34:2 (2003): 107–33; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, eds., Cloth and Human Experience (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press,1989). 6 See, for example, Vanda Foster, Bags and Purses (London: B. T. Batsford, 1982), p. 45. 7 Like any other archive, the surviving collections of pockets each reflect the accidents of survival, the particular historical conditions in which they were made and the prejudices and judgements of those who deposited them in museums. 8 This essay is an initial publication from an interdisciplinary AHRC project, ‘Pockets of History’, directed by Barbara Burman, on the production, distribution and use of women’s tie-on pockets between 1650 and 1920. One of the project’s outcomes will be a digital archive (www.vads.ahds.ac.uk/collections/pocketsofhistory.html) of a sample of around 300 tie-on pockets from British museum collections. See also Barbara Burman, ‘Pocketing the Difference: Gender and Pockets in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Gender and History, 14:3 (2002): 447–69. 9 V. D. Broughton, ed., Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte: Being the Journals of Mrs. Paperdiek (London: Bentley, 1887), p. 331; Hall, p. 154. 10 See, for example, Amgueddfeydd ac Orielau Cenedlaethol Cymru/National Museums and Galleries of Wales, 59.357. 11 The sample of 143 tie-on pockets is based on the following museum collections: Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; Glasgow City Council Museums, the Burrell Collection; Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall, Manchester; York Castle Museum, York; Abbey House Museum, Leeds; Hereford Art Gallery and Museum, Hereford; Museum of Costume and Assembly Rooms, Bath; Textile and Costume Study Centre, Carrow House, Norwich; Museum of Childhood, Bethnal Green, London; Hampshire County Museums Service; Oxfordshire County Museums Service.



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12 Patricia Wardle, A Guide to English Embroidery (London: HMSO, 1970), pp. 20–3; Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: Women’s Press, 1984). 13 ‘Morgan’s Haberdashery’, Banks and Heal Collection, British Museum Prints and Drawings; trade card of Robert Blunt, Guildhall Prints and Drawings, Guildhall Library, London; The Times, Saturday, 30 May 1789, p. 4; col. A; ‘Account of the Miss Haighton’s Stock and the Agreement between them and Mr W. Atkinson and Daughters, 1783’, pp. 13, 14, in the records of Major Blundell, Haberdasher and Warehouseman at Cheapside, late of Holborn Hill, 1774–1801’, Guildhall Library, London. 14 Janet Arnold, ‘The Lady’s Economical Assistant of 1808’, in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dress Making, ed. Barbara Burman (Oxford: Berg, 1999), pp. 223–33; Anon., The Workwoman’s Guide: Containing Instructions to the improvement in Cutting Out and Completing . . . By a Lady, 2nd edition (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., Stationer’s Hall Court, 1840), p. 72; Anon., The Ladies Work-table Book: Containing Clear and Practical Instruction in Plain and Fancy Needlework, Embroidery, Knitting, Netting and Crochet, With Numerous Engravings (New York: J. Winchester, 1844), p. 48. See also The Magazine of Domestic Economy (London: W.S. Orr, and Co, Paternoster Row; Edinburgh: W.R. Chambers, 1837–42). 15 Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher and P. Jackson, 1835); A. P. Wadsworth and J. de Lacy Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600–1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931); Jane Tozer and Sarah Levitt, Fabric of Society: A Century of People and their Clothes, 1770–1870 (Cambridge: L Ashley, 1983); Mary B. Rose, ed., The Lancashire Cotton Industry: A History since 1700 (Preston: Lancashire County Books, 1996); Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 16 For the Snowshill Manor collection, National Trust, see Nancy Bradfield, Costume in Detail: Women’s Dress, 1730–1930 (London: George Harrap, 1968), especially pp. 87–156. 17 See, for example, William Mulready, The Careless Messenger Detected, 1821. Oil on board, Trustees of the Lambton Estate; Thomas Webster, Going to the Fair, 1837. Oil on panel. Sheepshanks Gift, Victoria and Albert Museum. FA220. 18 See Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design and the Decorative Arts, Britain, 1500–1900 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2001), pp. 187–211. In an earlier view of the use of white, C. Willett Cunnington, the original collector of Fanny’s pockets, noted that the use of white materials for women’s underclothing in the early part of the century was ‘symbolic rather than hygienic in origin’ and was ‘by no means accompanied by a high standard of bodily cleanliness’. He also asserted that the ‘excessive use of white implied that the wearer was of the leisured class who would have no occasion to exert herself’. C. Willett Cunnington, English Women’s Clothing in the Nineteenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1937), p. 17. 19 Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 151–83, 364–95. 20 Baines, p. 14; David Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, Manufactures, Fisheries and Navigation, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: n. pub., 1805), IV, p. 81. When it came to the poor, commentators could discover the virtues of linen. See, for example, Esther Howlett, Cottage Comforts with Hints for Promoting them Gleaned from Experience, Enlivened with Anecdotes. (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1825), p. 36.





21 Macpherson, IV, p. 80. 22 Florence M. Montgomery, Textiles in America, 1650–1870 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984), pp. 218–22. 23 In 1769 Arthur Young reckoned the wages of men and women weaving corded dimities at between 3s and 8s a week. Wadsworth and de Lacy Mann, pp. 401–3. 24 Gloria Breeskin Peck, ‘Alice and George Hepplewhite’s “Cabinet-maker and Upholsterer’s Guide”’, Women’s Art Journal, 8:2 (1987), pp. 25–6. Of 93 adverts in The Times mentioning dimity in household auctions between 1785 and 1790, 85 referred to bed linen. 25 The Lady’s Economical Assistant, Or, the Art of Cutting Out, and Making Wearing Apparel (London: John Murray, J. Harding; Edinburgh: A. Constable and Co., 1808), pp. 5, 29. 26 Workwoman’s Guide, pp. 29, 40, 41, 43, 44, 104, 216. 27 See, for example, Old Bailey Proceedings Online, September 1757, Trial of Rebecca How (t17570914-50); OBP, October 1777, Trial of Christiana Fliggard, Sidney M’Daniel, Ann Chamberlain, Ann Brown, t17771015-51; OBP, January 1778, Trial of Henry Green, Thomas Dunn, William Stevens, John Pugh, Robert Griffiths, Elizabeth Sidey (t17780115-38). 28 Workwoman’s Guide, pp. 180–90. See also Mrs William Parkes (Frances), Domestic Duties: Or, Instructions to Young Married Ladies on the Management of their Households and the Regulation of their Conduct in the Various Relations and Duties of Married Life (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1825), pp. 172–7; Anon., The Home Book, Or, Young Housekeepers’ Assistant: Forming a Complete System of Domestic and Household Accounts. With Estimates of Expenditure etc, In every Department of Housekeeping. Founded on Forty-Five years’ personal experience. By Lady (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1829). 29 ‘An Inventory of the late Mrs Waller’s Apparel’, Hampshire Record Office 29M67/57. Notably, Mrs Waller also possessed a significant quantity of dimity in her household, including window curtains, bed curtains and bed linen. See ‘A Catalogue of the Household Furniture of the Late Mrs Waller’, HRO, 29M67/50. 30 Christina Walkley and Vanda Foster, Crinolines and Crimping Irons: Victorian Clothes: How they were Cleaned and Cared For (London: Peter Owen, 1978), pp. 50–69. For Fanny Jarvis’s apparel, see Jane Tozer and Sarah Levitt, Fabric of Society: A Century of People and their Clothes, 1770–1870: Essays Inspired by the Collection at Platt Hall, The Gallery of English Costume, Manchester (Manchester: L. Ashley, 1983), p. 67. 31 Of the 96 pockets in our sample dated to the nineteenth century, 40 were marked in some way similar to Fanny’s pockets and 17 in an identical fashion. 32 For early developments, see Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). The formation of a domestic ideology is traced in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, revised edition, 2002), pp. 149–92, 357–96. 33 See, for example, Domestic Economy: Or, a Complete System of English Housekeeping. By Maximilian Hazlemere (London: R. J. Treswick and Co., 1794); J. M. Flindall, The Complete Family Assistant, Including Economical hints on the Use of Provisions, Fuel, etc. and every variety of information calculated to benefit the Condition of the Poor; or connected with Domestic Economy, 5s 6d. (London: J. M. Flindall, 1813); Seven Hundred Domestic Hints in Every Branch of Family Management, Combining Utility with Elegance and Economy with the Enjoyment of a Home (London, Charles Tilt, 1839); Home Book, Or, Young Housekeepers’ Assistant; Parkes, Domestic Duties.



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34 Lady’s Economical Assistant, pp. vii–xi, 1–33; Magazine of Domestic Economy (1836–7), pp. 161–3, (1841–42), pp. 5, 41–2, 73, 117, 247–50; Workwoman’s Guide, pp. iii–vi, 15–177; Ladies Work-Table Book, pp. i–vii and passim. 35 Howlett, pp. 32–6; Workwoman’s Guide, pp. 11–14. 36 Murray, Domestic Oracle, pp. 512–21; Workwoman’s Guide, pp. 119–22, 217–37; Parkes, pp. 172–9. 37 C. Willett and Phillis Cunnington, The History of Underclothes (London: Faber and Faber, 2nd edition, 1981), pp. 63–85; Walkley and Foster, pp. 40–9. 38 Hall, pp. 39–40. 39 ‘Marcella’ or Marseilles has not been extensively studied, but see Clare Rose, ‘The Manufacture and Sale of “Marseilles” Quilting in Eighteenth-Century London’, CIETA Bulletin, 76 (1999): 105–14; Jacqueline M. Atkins, ‘From Lap to Loom: Marseilles Quilts, Marseilles-Style Spreads and their White Work Offspring’, Proceedings of the Textile History Forum, 7–8 July 2000 (Cooperstown, New York, 2000), pp. 13–25; Montgomery, Textiles in America, pp. 289–92; Averil Colby, Quilting (London: B. T. Batsford, 1987), p. 149; Kathryn Berenson, Quilts of Provence: The Art and Craft of French Quiltmaking (London: Thames & Hudson, 1996), pp. 48–67. 40 In the Old Bailey records, for example, ‘marcella’ petticoats are consistently valued at higher rates than dimity ones, though it is not always clear whether it is the hand- or loom-quilted version that is being discussed. 41 See, for example, the description of the qualities of the objects in the grandmother’s pockets. Hall, pp. 37–8. 42 Hall, pp. 37, 154. 43 In nineteenth-century literature, dimity’s everydayness gives it a particular range of meanings from moral and material impoverishment to simplicity and virtue in humble, domestic life. See, for example, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 137; Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (London: John Lehmann, 1948), pp. 153, 184; W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (London: Penguin Classics, 2001), p. 179. 44 So common, in fact, was this design that it can be found echoed in patchwork tieon pockets. See, for example, two patchwork pockets in the Gallery of Costume at Platt Hall, Manchester, MCAG.1947.1250 and MCAG.1947.1262. For ‘marcella’ pockets, see York Castle Museum (YCM 150.42), Hampshire County Museums and Archive Service (HCCMS CRH 1973.16), Hereford Art Gallery and Museum (HHS 2339), Leeds Abbey House Museum (LEEDM.E.X.0171, LEEDM.E.0172) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (T 150–1970). 45 Hall, pp. 126–9.




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

In The Mysteries of Udolpho, Emily must purchase ‘a little straw hat such as was worn by the peasant girls of Tuscany’ in order to appease the ‘surprise’ she has ‘excited’ by travelling without a hat through ‘one of those pastoral vallies of the Apennines, which might be painted for a scene of Arcadia’.1 Radcliffe uses this surprise, of course, to worry the reader, by adding to the tension that the absence of this ‘necessary article of dress’ (p. 427) will render Emily, escaping from Udolpho, noticeable and memorable. She also transforms our Gothic heroine, a lover of literature, music and art, into a shopper, one who must consume to remain ‘pure’ in the eyes of the public. Later, we find that although this is a hat that peasant girls wear, it resonates with picturesque elegance and classical allusion. In fact, the purchase secures not only her successful escape from Montoni, but also her transitory entrance into a Claude painting; she wears the very same fashion that the girls do who have an ‘Arcadian air’: Their dress was a very short full petticoat of light green, with a bodice of white silk; the sleeves loose, and tied up at the shoulders with ribbons and bunches of flowers. Their hair, falling in ringlets on their necks, was also ornamented with flowers, and with a small straw hat, which, set rather backward and on one side of the head, gave an expression of gaiety and smartness to the whole figure’. (p. 397) Even as a desperate fugitive, we know now that Emily was ‘smart’. A focus on hats reminds us that novels have long been associated with consumer culture and the escalation of a middle-class, female readership. Much of the recent work on the coterminous rise of this genre with capitalism and industrial production tends to critique consumption and especially female characters’ material profligacy. It has been argued that buying and wearing transparently reveal the desire to flaunt one’s money, or comprise an activity that shackles an individual, or engage the individual’s imagination as they pursue pleasure. Erin Mackie relates how eighteenth-century theories of 52



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consumption argued that ‘the indulgence of consuming passions may mean enslavement to the market: “every shop was a gazing-trap”. Exceeding the prudence of a sober mercantilism, there is something feminised, erotically meretricious about these displays of things set out to snare the passerby.’2 Michael Kwass reminds us, however, that ‘we are only just beginning to understand the cultural and intellectual transformations that accompanied the spread of consumer goods in the eighteenth century. How did men and women . . . come to understand the world of goods and its remarkable expansion? In what terms did they characterise their relationship to things?’3 These are two of the questions I hope to begin answering in this essay. Many heroines from Romantic era novels use hats in tantalising ways to attempt to secure their position, safety and survival in society. Hats blur the boundary between luxury and necessity, rendering shopping and fashion essential activities for viability; finding the excess in the object becomes a source of insight rather than superfluity. In Udolpho, Emily derives pleasure, no doubt, from her ‘smart’ Arcadian accoutrement, but we never forget that her hat might be a barrier between life and death, or virginity and rape. Thus, I will not argue that consumption threatens to appropriate an individual’s identity through ‘a kind of psychic colonisation by the commodity’ (Mackie, p. 47), but rather that a woman often uses these commodities to fend off the ways that social systems threaten to colonise her. A woman’s body may be a ‘site of cultural formation’,5 but individual heroines use hats to shift the grounds of power, taking control over hegemonic threats to render their bodies sites of subjective inertia, dominated by social codes. As things, hats carry an electricity that is both intensely personal and social. And, like people, they make things happen in these novels, almost as if they had a volition of their own: in that sense, these headpieces have a performative impact that blurs the boundaries between the material and the human.6 Like the body itself, things – in this case, hats – contain a volatility that subverts what Judith Butler has called ‘strategies of domination, rendering them vulnerable to displacement’.7 It should not surprise us that novels mention hats with such vigorous consistency in the literature of this era. Althea Mackenzie points out that in the eighteenth century . . . women of every level of society would have worn a hat, bonnet or cap at all times during the day, whether indoors or out. . . . A head covering also served as a gauge for the values of society. The confidence and prosperity of the mid-eighteenth century is reflected in the bizarre range and excesses of headwear and hairstyles, whereas the concepts of liberty and fraternity introduced by the French Revolution resulted in an adoption of ‘lower class’ forms of dress.8 What surprises me, however, is how crucial a role hats and bonnets play in the development of plot and character, but how rarely literary critics have explored this topic.9 In this essay, I will discuss some of the roles they play in



New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 53

Jillian Heydt-Stevenson

Burney’s Evelina and, especially, The Wanderer, novels which acknowledge the impact that the male gaze has in dictating fashion and viewing woman as merely an exhibition.10 They also provide dynamic instances in which hats and clothes construct an aesthetic and gendered world resonating with political, psychological and discursive meanings: hats work literally as objects that frame the face, but also provide frames for historical matters and social ideologies that find concrete expression in material objects. Like clothes, but in unique ways, hats serve special framing functions because they surround the face, they hide it, they alter its shape, and because they can and often are removed in public places. Laura Rice has argued that, in general, frames ‘conjoi[n] the cultural, political, and personal assumptions we project onto the world – and the resistance of the world beyond us to being contained in a single image, a single framed space. . . . Something is always beyond the frame; the image is always captive to the circle of assumptions we draw around it.’11 The hat provides a singularly dramatic instance of this dynamic since it is an object that fulfils social expectations and yet resists those expectations in so far as the wearer can exercise control over how she uses that object to frame her reception in the world. In each instance that these authors include a hat or bonnet, we see it take on a value more powerful than its practical function suggests, a value that often renders its utility evanescent. Bill Brown argues that Producing a thing – effecting thingness – depends . . . on a fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation, on an irregular if not unreasonable reobjectification of the object that dislodges it from the circuits through which it is what it typically is. Thingness is precipitated as a kind of misuse value. By misuse value, I mean to name the aspects of an object – sensuous, aesthetic, semiotic – that become legible, audible, palpable when the object is experienced in whatever time it takes (in whatever time it is) for an object to become another. . . . For the life of things made manifest in the time of misuse is, should we look, a secret in plain sight – not a life behind or beneath the object but a life that is its fluctuating shape and substance and surface, a life that the subject must catalyze but cannot contain.12 A hat offers protection from the elements; but through a ‘fetishistic overvaluation or misappropriation’, it was also deemed necessary, from ancient times, to cover women’s hair, allegedly a sign of her inherently shameful nature. In doing so, it paradoxically calls attention to that shame while also functioning as a frame to make sexual beauty more radiant, one reason why this article of female clothing has always been associated with eroticism and even a licentious sexuality. As St Paul says (I Corinthians 11:1–16): But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. Every man



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praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head. But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head. . . . For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: But the woman is the glory for the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.13 It is necessary for a woman to wear a hat so that she can be reminded of her subordination to man and of the fact that she requires a mediating device between her and God, with whom there is no possibility for direct connection. What is surprising in the novels, however, is that although one of the original purposes of hats was to naturalise women’s shameful, subordinate essence, women often use hats to dispute that naturalisation. Further, although the male gaze objectifies women, women’s subjectification of things allows them at least partly to protect themselves and to use a sign of oppression to assert their power.14 In this sense, hats provide an exception to the notion that things themselves are always gendered. Nancy Armstrong has argued that pedagogical literature for women mapped out a field of knowledge that would produce a specifically female form of subjectivity. To gender this field, things within the field itself had to be gendered. Masculine objects were understood in terms of their relative economic and political qualities, while feminine objects were recognised by their relative emotional qualities.15 Although I would agree that hats as things retain an emotive force, they also allow women to wield what would conventionally be called masculine political and economic authority. In Evelina and The Wanderer, we see powerful examples of this ironic reversal of Pauline doctrine, in which women subvert a biblical injunction by redefining the role of the hat. Further, we see that when hats frame the face, they not only provide remarkable chimerical transformations, but also seize in a literal and symbolic frame these ancient assumptions, propagated by religion and social ideologies. Evelina and especially The Wanderer expose the vulgar truth that for a woman to be ‘the glory of . . . man’ is primarily to be at the mercy of personal and institutional brutality. Likewise, the hats they wear function less as a mode to avoid ‘dishonour’ than as a way to enhance a woman’s mortal glory – her beauty; in fact, the very need to cover one’s head at times functions to increase a woman’s vulnerability to the very men for whom she is supposed to be a ‘glory’. We see an instance of this when the dangerous rake, Sir Sycamore, threatens Juliet in The Wanderer, but she cannot flee from her house – and from him – without her hat and cloak, which are shut up in her room (p. 442). When women, however, ‘set their heads to right’ for their own purposes and pleasures, the




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The first speech was made by Madame Duval, who said, ‘It’s quite a shocking thing to see ladies come to so genteel a place as Ranelagh with hats on; it has a monstrous vulgar look; I can’t think what they wear them for. There’s no such thing to be seen in Paris’.

‘Indeed’, cried sir Clement, ‘I must own myself no advocate for hats; I am sorry the ladies ever invented or adopted so tantalising a fashion; for, where there is beauty, they only serve to shade it, and where there is none, to excite a most unavailing curiosity. I fancy they were originally worn by some young and whimsical coquet’.

‘More likely’, answered the Captain, ‘they were invented by some wrinkled old hag, who’d a mind for to keep the young fellows in chase, let them be never so weary’. (p. 59) Here, gender issues dominate the hermeneutics of the hat. For Madame Duval, its significance relies only on its context, and, when worn at the wrong event, its presence signifies an assault on the world of fashion – that is, Paris – and sends a message that exposes one woman’s vulgarity to another. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly which styles Madame Duval refers to here since hat fashions varied, though much of French fashion at this time focused on high and elaborate headdresses decorated with a small hat and a lot of ornamental matter (jewels, flowers, ribbons, bows and feathers) perched on top of the hair/hairpiece which did not shade or occlude the face in any way. In contrast, by 1778, the publication date of Evelina, women’s hats in England had become quite large, with ‘heavily trimmed crowns and brims turned up at the back’.16 These would necessarily create the ‘disguising’ circumstances that Sir Clement and the Captain so abhor. Sir Clement envisages the hat as a barrier sequestering women from male control and which serves no purpose other than to excite or foil men’s sexual desires; the hat’s presence or absence signifies worth only in regard to the world which the scopophilic gaze dominates. The Captain finds in hats a protective world that ‘hags’ can occupy in order to manipulate vulnerable men. In this sense, the older woman, whose hat veils her age, is dangerous because she has crossed boundaries. Living on the ‘edge’, so to speak, of matrimony and spinsterhood, or happiness and misery, of the desirable and undesirable becomes – all because of age – the men she ‘tricks’ consider her a transgressor and even as repulsively odd.



novels dramatise the misogynistic backlash that occurs, as this example from Evelina reveals:

In this scene from Evelina, all three of these characters express their fear of the hat’s power to occlude boundaries – between fashion and vulgarity, beauty and ugliness, youth and old age, private and public. The woman who manipulates objects rather than simply becoming an object herself or a slave enthralled by those things intimidates male sexual prowess. A similar situation in The Wanderer occurs when the ageing beauty Miss Brinville, ‘adroitly shaded, through a becoming skill in the arrangement of her head-dress, appear[s] nearly in [her] first lustre’ (p. 234), a fact which confuses a young Baronet, who ‘fall[s] desperately enamoured of her beauty’ until he sees her the next frosty morning, ‘a caricature of herself’ (pp. 234–5). Ideologically, the situation in this later book is rendered more complicated: although Burney evinces contempt for Miss Brinville’s vanity, and in doing so seems to ally herself with conservative complaints about female affectation, the novel also makes excruciatingly clear how unjust these complaints are. This is a point brought home ironically, and poignantly, when we read John Wilson Croker’s review of The Wanderer in the Quarterly Review, where his attack on Burney resembles the Baronet’s (Sycamore’s) criticism of Miss Brinville and mirrors in general male fear of female metamorphic power in the novel: he argues that the novel – and, by association, Burney – was ‘an old coquette who endeavours, by the wild tawdriness and laborious gaiety of her attire, to compensate for the loss of the natural charms of freshness, novelty, and youth’.17 Although the novel makes us dislike Miss Brinville, it also makes it clear that both she and Juliet use hats in order to survive social situations and sometimes even to triumph over them by manipulating those codes to their own advantage. Given the viciousness of Croker’s review, we understand with even more urgency the necessity for a woman to protect herself by using objects to metamorphose when necessary. Susan Pearce has argued that objects ‘are intentional inscriptions on the physical world which embody social meaning . . . [S]ocial ideas cannot exist without physical content, but physical objects are meaningless without social content’.18 Riley’s mockery of Juliet’s attempts at self-protection as well as Captain Mirvan’s and Sir Clement’s complaints about the power women take on with hats are part of a larger history of women using headdresses in this way. In Evelina, the doorkeeper at the Opera-House suggests that ‘the Ladies . . . sit in the gallery . . . for they’ll hardly choose to go into the pit with their hats on’ (p. 89). In Hannah Cowley’s play The Runaway (1776), Garrick’s ‘Epilogue’ protests against women’s enormous headdresses, which take their cue from ‘strange fantastic art’ instead of ‘Nature[’s]. . . skill’.19 Misty Anderson analyses the gender implications of this phenomenon: Articles and prints in The Oxford Magazine satirised the fashion for towering headdresses that threatened their surroundings and particularly the men in their orbit. . . . S. H. Grimm’s The French Lady in London, or the Head Dress for the Year 1771 shows a woman with a head of hair that terrifies





male onlookers and a menagerie of pets. These visual and textual accounts of high fashion suggest that the problem of overdressed hair is a French import, a threat coded in psychosexual terms. . . . [I]mmoderately dressed hair, as a sign of corrupt foreign taste, threatens to disrupt the gender balance. The array of styles includes ‘fruits, roots, greens’ and ‘A kitchengarden, to adorn my face’! The effect of the whole is farcical, but the ‘curls like Guns’ give a phallic presence to women who defy ‘Nature’ with the style and height of their hair. Coming from the mouth of the defiant Bella, Garrick’s reproof settles on women the responsibility for maintaining the cultural climate in which English masculinity can flourish.20 Garrick’s uneasiness resembles the reactions we find in both The Wanderer and Evelina, where the heroines require a physical superstructure to protect them as they face peril in suffocating situations, where their seemingly constant blushes expose their inner feelings but also subject them simultaneously to charges of coquetry. Pam Perkins argues that ‘Burney is at pains to demonstrate that women cannot take themselves out of economic life, pointing out that if women are not allowed to sell their labor, they will have to sell themselves’.21 Significantly, Burney uses a thing (a hat) that has both a public and a privatising function to call attention to the fact that her heroine exists in an economic world that no one, let alone a wandering woman, can escape. *** When Juliet cries out, ‘How dreadfully am I involved! In what misery of helplessness! – What is woman, – with the most upright designs, the most rigid circumspection, – what is woman unprotected? She is pronounced upon only from outward semblance: – and, indeed, what other criterion has the world?’ (p. 344), she sums up one hope for the hat, that it can protect identity and modesty, especially in a world where women are constantly on display. The hat – covering, shading, hiding and framing the face – gives a woman one of the few ways she can gaze without censure and protect herself from the gaze of the other, as she can, turtle-like, move into her shell. Finding herself the object of ‘every eye’ in the Bristol Hotwells pump-room, Evelina ‘pull[s] [her] hat over [her] face, and, by the assistance of Mrs. Selwyn, endeavour[s] to screen [herself] from observation’ (p. 326). In The Wanderer, the suicidal, cross-dressing Elinor disguises herself in part in a ‘slouched hat . . . that covered [her] forehead and eye-brows, and shaded [her] eyes’ (p. 357).22 The large French nightcap Juliet wears the night she escapes from France, and which forms part of her disguise, had so ‘completely hidden [ Juliet’s] general form’ (p. 50) that Harleigh does not recognise her (Figure 13).23 Later in the novel, Juliet draws ‘a large black bonnet . . . over her eyes’ to avoid being recognised by her enemy, Mr Riley (p. 624) (Figure 14).24 The Wanderer addresses the moral dilemma faced by an unprotected woman: she occupies



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Figure 13 ‘Two Ladies at Breakfast in their Dressing-Room’, The Gallery of Fashion (November 1794). V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum.

‘an inconceivable position’ (p. 348) where the only identity that exists for any woman who lives outside the context of family and marital security is that of the criminal adventurer or prostitute. Suggesting that the border between women working and working women (i.e. prostitutes) is utterly permeable, many of these points of crucial danger occur in milliners’ shops, places where women congregate but also where they work. Juliet, for example, lives above a milliner’s shop and then works in it; there she is accosted by seducers, and tries to prevent the seduction of another young woman in the shop. In Evelina, the heroine is chased and so slips into a milliner’s shop to ‘wipe the dirt off my gown’ (p. 328). There she finds Sir Clement, her manic pursuer,





Figure 14 ‘Morning Dresses’ featuring (far left) a plain white chip hat with a lilac ribbon, Gallery of Fashion ( July 1794). V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum.

who corners her to express his love and find out where she has been staying and how he can see her again (p. 329). As a thing, one in its phase of ‘misuse value’,25 the hat allows Burney in The Wanderer to explore human and women’s rights through links among women’s heads, their headdresses and the French Revolution’s favourite form of vengeance, the guillotine. As Juliet’s husband can ‘roughly seiz[e] her arm, with one hand, while, with the other, he rudely lift[s] up her bonnet, to



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examine her face’ (p. 726), so can he ‘advertis[e] a description of [her] person, and set a price upon [her] head; publicly vowing that [she] should be made over to the guillotine, when found, for an example’ (p. 749). When Juliet cries out, ‘[o]h reign so justly called of terrour’! (p. 749) she refers as justly to the lack of women’s as well as of human rights during this era. More than just her husband’s brutality countenances this marriage. The illegal nuptials are sanctioned by cultural institutions, including the French mayoralty that permits his union to Juliet, and, by personal ties, including the Marchioness’s willingness to sacrifice Juliet for the sake of the Bishop: ‘The civil ceremony, dreadful, dreadful! . . . was instantly begun; in the midst of the buz of business, the clamour of many tongues, the sneers of contempt, and the laughter of derision. . . . The commissary [Juliet’s husband] . . . vociferously ordered that the ceremony should be hurried on. He was obeyed!’ (p. 745). When she escapes he pursues her, hiring a crew of spies, notably Master Surly, to search for Juliet as she flees from one house to another, crosses the Channel, sequesters herself among the rich and finally hides in the New Forest, living with peasants, farmers and poachers. Frances L. Restuccia argues, in ‘Literary Representations of Battered Women’, that ‘Batterers themselves have picked up on the effectiveness of modern disciplinary methods. They typically install a system of surveillance of their victim’s every move, designed to mould her into a voluntarily obedient individual’.26 Juliet’s refusal of help when it is offered and her perpetual recalcitrant silence suggest that, at some level, she obeys the system that victimises her. In fact, it takes a public spectacle of physical and sexual violence to represent her dilemma and thus to communicate what she has been unable or refused to express. The Wanderer draws a parallel between two things: the bonnet Juliet’s husband rips off her and the guillotine’s function, which rips off a head. In drawing that parallel, the novel illustrates Juliet’s pain in the most spectacular way, theatrically linking her loss of rights to those which the Terror itself stole. The people of the inn watch and listen as a man, dressed with disgusting negligence, and of an hideous countenance, yet wearing an air of ferocious authority; advancing by large strides, roughly seized her arm, with one hand, while, with the other, he rudely lifted up her bonnet, to examine her face. . . . Then, addressing Juliet, ‘If you dare assert’, he said, ‘that you are not my wife, your perjury may cost you dear’! . . . ‘I put you to the test’; continued the man, striding to the end of the gallery, and opening the last door: ‘Go into that chamber’! She shrieked aloud with agony uncontrollable. (pp. 726, 728) In this scene of public humiliation, the hitherto mute Juliet ‘shriek[s] aloud’ as her husband robs her of the two primary sources of protection she has exercised thus far in the novel – disguising herself with clothes and hats, and remaining silent. Elaine Scarry writes that ‘the failure to express pain . . . will





always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power; conversely, the successful expression of pain will always work to expose and make impossible that appropriation and conflation’.27 Indeed, until the very last chapter, Juliet’s silence, which even her closest friends ‘think a little chimerical’ (p. 852), has in some instances exacerbated the pain, shame and victimisation she experiences. The act of hiding, whether in a forest or under a hat, has ambivalent consequences: first, in some cases it expedites her suppression and therefore the intensification of her pain. But further, because they can be ‘rudely lifted off’, hats are fragile disguises. When Juliet’s husband tries to force her to accompany him to jail, ‘her head was bowed down with shame’, but still she does not ‘escap[e] [Sir Jaspar Herrington’s] eye’; for when she had fainted earlier, her ‘straw-bonnet [had] fallen off, without being missed, [and] her head was wholly without shade’ (p. 735). *** Things embody ideologies, acting out human social impulses and desires in a synergetic, rather than mechanical process. Things just come to seem human – especially if they have been worn or have been in contact with the body – since they take on their owner’s or producer’s character, and even conduct that person’s chemistry, transmitting a spellbinding charge. This helps to explain the nearly inexplicable impact of two young women’s exchange of hats in The Wanderer. Juliet, fleeing from her pursuers, trades her bonnet, ‘which was of white chip, for one of the most coarse and ordinary of straw’, belonging to a poor girl, Debby Dyson, with whom she stays briefly (p. 665). In fact, in wearing this, she does save herself, briefly, for when a suspicious man asks if Juliet had ‘arrived in a white muslin gown, and a white chip-hat’, his mother answers that ‘her gown might be white muslin . . . for aught she could say to the contrary, for it was covered almost all round by a blue striped apron; but as to her hat, it was nothing but a straw-bonnet as coarse and ordinary as he might wish to set eyes on.’ ‘O then, he said, he was clear it could not be she’ (p. 673) (Figure 15).28 Later, she receives a gift of a ‘white chip bonnet of the most beautiful texture’ from Sir Jasper; she fears to accept the gift, and thus be indebted to him, but longs wistfully for ‘its umbrageous succour’ since her face is ‘now exposed to every eye’ (p. 769). The right purchase at the right time can literally save your life. Juliet, hoping for disguise first from the lower-class costume, then from the elegant chip bonnet, hopes to house herself in these hats, which function as metaphorical nests. In doing so, she falls into what Gaston Bachelard calls the paradoxical ‘daydreams of nests’: A nest – and this we understand right away – is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security. . . . In a sort of naïve way, we relive the instinct of the bird, taking pleasure in accentuating the mimetic features of the green nest in green leaves. We definitely saw it, but we say that



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Figure 15 ‘Morning Dresses’ The Gallery of Fashion (November 1796). V&A Images/ Victoria and Albert Museum.

it was well hidden. . . . And so when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence.29 Her ‘safe houses’ in many cases are the hats she ‘nests’ in. This nest, however, offers only the illusion of security, rendering her at times invisible and at





others a spectacle, depending on the projections the viewer inflicts on her. In donning these two articles of clothing, she learns that she has also unexpectedly slipped on her hostess’s ‘light character’ (p. 666), when she finds herself pursued by Debby’s aggressive suitor. Her coarse straw hat makes her vulnerable to victimisation when she begs for water and food, one man demanding a kiss in payment, another offering her ‘cyder’ in a ‘familiar’ manner (p. 668). She reaffirms the daydream of nests when, travelling alone through the New Forest, she experiences what certain kinds of hats promise: the ability to see without being seen. She ‘mount[s] a hillock to take a general survey of the spot’, while she herself is so protected from the anxiety of being viewed that she enjoys ‘undisturbed repose’ (p. 676). Yet immediately after this epiphany, Debby Dyson’s suitor again accosts her and the precarious shelter becomes the site of danger: ‘Why if there ben’t Deb. Dyson! O the jeade! If I ben’t venged of un! A would no’ know me this very blessed morning’ (p. 677). Neither the hat nor the woman who wears it exists in hermetic seclusion from each other. Offering an extraordinary example of the notion that ‘the body is an optical effect accomplished by clothing’,30 this young man, though apparently having known Debby his whole life, cannot tell the difference between Juliet and Debby, since he bases his entire identification of her on the fact that he has seen Debby wearing ‘that seame bonnet’. There seems something simultaneously ancient and magical, new and crude about his confusion: the former because it suggests the shimmering, talismanic power of things associated mostly with primeval culture, the latter because it reeks of a more modern objectification of women in a consumer world. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau points out, ‘One of the most conspicuous features of commodity culture is its sexualisation of the commodity, its eroticisation of objects, which in turn inflects, if not determines, the psychic structures of consumer desire’.31 Thus, in The Wanderer, even though the suitor’s friend points out that Juliet is ‘too slim for Debby. Debby’d outweigh the double o’ un’, the suitor claims that Debby can ‘make herself fat or lean as a wull’, but the hat is ‘her bonnet of old’ (p. 677). Calling her a ‘jeade’, he vows he will make her pay for ‘this trick’ (p. 677). He asserts that he knows it is Debby because she wears the bonnet he watched Johnny Ascot give to her ‘at our fair, two years agone’ (p. 677). Suggesting that in watching Johnny give her the bonnet, he watched Johnny know her body, one that he too ‘know[s] . . . well enough, I [warrant] me’, he breaches the boundary between clothing and the body, intimating the erotic knowledge that not just the bonnet itself symbolises, but the exchange, we presume, of Debby’s favours for the bonnet. The mercurial human body thus is less knowable than the object it wears, and flesh is less indicative of identity than fashionable accoutrements. When Debby’s suitor reaffirms the point that the hat makes Juliet readable, we are reminded that this is precisely what Captain Mirvan and Sir Clement cannot tolerate about the hat: it obfuscates an easy and meaningful reading of the woman’s body as a cultural type. Juliet’s ability to disguise herself with a tool of oppression underscores how the ability to metamorphose both empowers her and makes her vulnerable



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‘What a rare hand you are, Demoiselle . . . at your hocus pocus work! Who the deuce, with that Hebe face of yours, could have thought of your being a married woman! . . . But you metamorphose yourself about so, one does not know which way to look for you. Ovid was a mere fool to you. . . . Neither juggler nor conjuror is a match for her. . . . Now she turns herself into a vagrant, not worth sixpence; and now, into a fine player and singer that ravishes all ears . . . and now, again, as you see, you can’t tell whether she’s a house-maid or a country girl! yet a devilish fine creature, faith! As fine a creature as ever I beheld, – . . . Look but what a beautiful head of hair she’s displaying to us now! . . . But I won’t swear that she does not change it, in a minute or two, for a skull-cap! She’s a droll girl, faith! I like her prodigiously!’ (p. 771) Virtually every change he describes here refers to what headdress she has been wearing: as a vagrant she wore a straw bonnet, as a fine player she wore an elegant dress and simple ornaments (p. 358), as a woman posing as single, but exposed as married, she is hatless, her ‘disordered . . . luxuriously curling hair’ (pp. 763, 761) undraped. Riley foresees that when she puts on a ‘skull-cap’ (a light, close-fitting cap), she will take on another identity. Significantly, there seems to be an allusion here to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France: ‘The great object in these politics is to metamorphose France, from a great kingdom into one great play-table; to turn its inhabitants into a nation of gamesters; to make speculation as extensive as life; to mix it with all its concerns; and to divert the whole of the hopes and fears of the people from their usual channels, into the impulses, passions, and superstitions of those who live on chances.’32 Riley’s accusations against Juliet – that her ability to metamorphose gives her tremendous sexual power – also imply that she has returned from France with the same delusive goals that that country harbours. As we have seen in the previous examples, hats – for reasons that must stem from one of their original functions, to cover shame – have been associated with erotic allure and sexual transgression. In the most, and perhaps only, positive way in which the novel asserts this link, Harleigh erotically, sensuously peers under Juliet’s bonnet: He ventured to bend his head below her bonnet; and saw, then, that the blush which had visited, flown, and re-visited her face, had fixed itself in the deepest tint upon her cheek. He gazed upon her in ecstatic silence, till, looking up, and, for the first time, suffering her eyes willing to meet his . . . [a] smile . . . beamed over her features, so radiant, so embellishing, that Harleigh wondered he had ever thought her beautiful before. (pp. 860–1)



to charges of sexual availability and even promiscuity. Riley, one of her pursuers attributes to her sorceress-like powers:


This scene, providing a startling parallel to her husband’s act – he had ‘rudely lifted up her bonnet’ – exposes the sexual violence of the Commissary’s act. In contrast, Juliet’s participation in Harleigh’s uncovering of her face reveals a reciprocity of affection and erotic longing, one that transforms the pain she has hitherto experienced into the pain of pleasure, when she ‘suffer[s] her eyes to meet his’, an act that simultaneously reminds us of how strenuous her transition from public to private has been. The mutuality here also contrasts triumphantly to the arbitrary, vicious way exposure has heretofore functioned in the novel as a tyrannical assault rather than a democratic exchange. Her relationship to her hats thus provides a complex symbol of a larger Romantic era theme, that is, the individual and dialectical formulations of public and private experience, whether in poetry or politics, and the dynamic attempts to separate and or join the two, which remain in flux throughout this age. Juliet, like objects themselves, evades in dazzling ways others’ attempts to exert power over what she – or those things – signify. Both character and things defy their typical use-value. In this sense, a surprising reversal of expectations emerges: that to be a woman in this culture, which is necessarily to be a thing, constitutes in part a share in the extraordinary possibilities for fluidity and indeterminacy of meanings that things embody. Juliet’s friends find fault with her demands for privacy and silence, demands which result in her impenetrability – they ‘think [her] a little chimerical’ (p. 852) – and this, as I argued earlier, intensifies her loneliness. However, that impenetrability also provides a kind of internalised ‘hat’ that allows her to remain to some extent inviolable. Here Patricia Meyer Spacks’ point is apropos. She argues that ‘[t]he kind of privacy . . . Burney explore[s] . . . consists in . . . subtle forms of self-protection’.33 The Wanderer, which acknowledges and celebrates the mystery of the other, provides a dynamic notion of identity, one that contrasts to a phatic, predictable set of constructions so often levied against women in this culture. Western civilisation has tended to see the body and mind in opposition, to see the body and its things as inimical to reason – and even to social and spiritual progress. In contrast, Evelina and The Wanderer reveal how powerfully bodies and things work both singly and together to tell truths about the life of women in the world of the everyday, which is, indeed, far from the ordinary.

Notes 1 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), pp. 428, 427. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically. The quotation in the title is from James Kenney’s Matrimony: a Petit Opera, 2nd edition (New York, 1818), p. 12. The original reads ‘. . . if I were just to change this gown, and set my head to rights’. Many thanks to Terry F. Robinson for alerting me to this line.



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2 Erin Mackie, Market à la Mode: Fashion, Commodity, and Gender in The Tatler and The Spectator (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 71. Mackie is quoting John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–9). 3 ‘Ordering the World of Goods: Consumer Revolution and the Classification of Objects in Eighteenth-Century France’, Representations, 82 (2003): 87–8. 4 Mackie, p. 47. 5 Marcia Pointon, ‘Jewellery in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Consumers and Luxury: Consumer Culture in Europe 1650–1850, ed. Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 139. 6 I am drawing here on Angela Esterhammer’s discussion of the Romantic performative, wherein ‘the identity of an individual or group can be called performative if that identity is established through the very process of practicing it – so that doing and being, or saying and being, or becoming and being, are indistinguishable’. The Romantic Performative: Language and Action in British and German Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. xii. 7 The context for this quotation is Butler’s repudiation of Pierre Bourdieu’s supposed determinism. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), p. 155. 8 Althea Mackenzie, Hats and Bonnets (London: National Trust Enterprises Limited, 2004), p. 5. 9 One exception is Penelope J. Corfield’s ‘Dress for Deference and Dissent: Hats and the Decline of Hat Honour’. This essay, focusing mostly on male headwear, analyses how hats, because they were ‘highly visible’, were ‘effective and very personal means of communication’. Costume, 23 (1989): 64. 10 Citations from these novels are from Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), and The Wanderer; Or, Female Difficulties, ed. Margaret Anne Doody, Robert L. Mack and Peter Sabor (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Subsequent references to both works will be given parenthetically. 11 Quoted in Mae G. Henderson, ‘Introduction: Borders, Boundaries, and Frame(work)s’, in Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies, ed. Mae G. Henderson, Essays from the English Institute (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 21. 12 Bill Brown, ‘The Secret Life of Things: Virginia Woolf and the Matter of Modernism’, in Aesthetic Subjects, ed. Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 399. 13 Quoted in Ruth Borker, ‘To Honor her Head: Hats as a Symbol of Women’s Position in Three Evangelical Churches in Edinburgh, Scotland’, in Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles, ed. Judith Hoch-Smith and Anita Spring (New York and London: Plenum Press, 1978), p. 59. 14 Although she does not discuss hats, Kristina Straub makes a similar point: The Wanderer ‘deploys a sort of running analogy between Juliet’s bodily and her verbal disguises as parallel means to female survival’. Divided Fictions: Fanny Burney and Feminine Strategy (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), p. 204. 15 ‘Introduction’ to Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 631. 16 Georgine De Courtais, Women’s Headdress and Hairstyles in England from AD 600 to the Present Day (London: B. T. Batsford, 1973) p. 86. By the 1780s French hats were considerably bigger. Women did wear an enormous, protective head-covering called a ‘calash’ or ‘calèche’ which anyone could hide under. Mackenzie explains




17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28

29 30 31

32 33

Jillian Heydt-Stevenson that a calash was ‘a collapsible construction made from whalebone or cane hoops covered with fabric’, which could cover a woman’s ‘head, or head and hat combined’ while travelling in inclement weather (p. 16). Quoted in Pam Perkins, ‘Social Criticism in The Wanderer’, Essays in Literature, 23.1 (1996): 70. Susan Pearce, Museums, Objects, Collections: A Cultural Study (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 21. Hannah Cowley, The Plays of Hannah Cowley, ed. Frederick M. Link (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1979), pp. 1–72, no page number for ‘Epilogue’. Misty Anderson, Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 150–1. Anderson is quoting Garrick’s ‘Epilogue’. Perkins, p. 79. The OED defines a slouched hat as a hat with a broad brim which laps down over the face. Figure 13 shows (from left to right) two nightcaps, with the one on the right more indicative of the concealing power of the cap Juliet wears. Figure 14 illustrates the difference between a head dressed simply with ‘coquelicot beads’ and a woman wearing a concealing ‘Cabriolet bonnet of gray silk’. For quotations, see descriptions in the Gallery of Fashion, November 1794. Brown, p. 399. Frances L. Restuccia, ‘Literary Representations of Battered Women: Spectacular Domestic Punishment’, in Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance, ed. Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel and Ellen E. Berry, Genders 23 (New York and London: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 47–8. Quoted in Restuccia, p. 69 Figure 15 shows (from left to right) a ‘[s]traw hat with carnation-coloured stripes, trimmed with rose-coloured ribands . . . a [p]lain white chip hat, trimmed with lilac ribands tied round the crown . . . and a [s]traw-coloured gipsy hat, trimmed with light blue ribands . . .’. These elegant hats suggesting the elegance of Juliet’s white chip bonnet, reveal why she would be conspicuous in a rural setting. Quotations are from the Gallery of Fashion, July 1794. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion, 1964), pp. 102–3. Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro, in Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body, ed. Warwick and Cavallaro (Oxford: Berg, 1998), p. xxii. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘The Other Side of Venus: The Visual Economy of Feminine Display’, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia, with Ellen Furlough (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1996), p. 113. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) p. 310; emphasis added. Patricia Meyer Spacks, ‘Privacy, Dissimulation, and Propriety: Frances Burney and Jane Austen’, Eighteenth Century Fiction, 12: 4 (2000): 531. In contrast, see Suzie Park’s essay on The Wanderer, where she argues that the novel’s energies show that both models of female expression – silence and direct expression – are actually ‘compelled versions of each other’. ‘This Disclosure Which is Not One: Recognising Depth, Resisting “Commissioned” Interiors in The Wanderer’, in Recognising the Romantic Novel: New Histories of British Fiction, ed. Jillian HeydtStevenson and Charlotte Sussman, forthcoming.



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Part II Women and Sculpture





Sculpting in Tiaras: Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts Rosalind P. Blakesley

Implicit in many accounts of women artists working in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the notion of struggle. Denied both the education and the exhibiting opportunities available to men, women had to battle to acquire the training necessary to develop their art, as well as the attention of patrons who might support it. At the same time, there were daily struggles, perhaps of a lesser nature, which nevertheless affected their ability to progress as professional artists, as when women portraitists risked provoking scurrilous rumours when, unaccompanied, they met the sitters for their work. Yet certain accounts in recent years have questioned this picture of unremitting struggle and exclusion by focusing on areas in which the circumstances of women artists improved. Gen Doy, for example, has argued that the French Revolution ‘opened up spaces for women to become artists in greater numbers and to tackle history paintings with the help of their teachers, despite the fact that the majority of the male bourgeois revolutionaries denied women equal political and social rights’.1 Moreover, in suggesting that the classicism of these women artists’ work stood in opposition to the Academy as a site of privilege and restricted opportunity,2 Doy accredits them with a clear voice in the cultural politics of the day. Recent work on women artists in Russia has also moderated views of them as wholly marginalised, not least by revealing the ways in which the Imperial Academy of Arts in St Petersburg formally recognised their work long before women were finally admitted as full-time students at the Academy in 1873.3 Of particular interest within the Russian context is Grand Duchess (later Empress) Maria Fedorovna (1759–1828), whose husband reigned as Tsar Paul I from 1796 to 1801 (Figure 16). Châtelaine of Pavlovsk, one of the most elegant of the Imperial palaces which surround St Petersburg, Maria Fedorovna was closely involved in its construction and embellishment, in the process playing a pivotal role in introducing and supporting new trends in the decorative arts and interior design. At the same time, she was an accomplished artist, of a stature sufficient to merit election as a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1820. 71



4

Rosalind P. Blakesley

Figure 16 Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder, Portrait of Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, 1795, oil on canvas, 101 9/16 ⫻ 68 1/8 in (258 ⫻ 173 cm), Pavlovsk Palace Museum, St Petersburg.

Such activities could, of course, be classed as typical of one of her means and rank, as refinement of taste and artistic skill were highly valued in noble and aristocratic women of the time. But Maria Fedorovna’s patronage was notably ambitious and multifaceted, her gradual shift in focus from foreign to Russian artefacts in particular bearing the imprimatur of one attuned to contemporary debates concerning the fortunes of Russian artists. Nor was her artistic practice conventional, for while she was capable of producing the drawings and watercolours expected of her social group, she greatly preferred sculpting and engraving medals and cameos, or turning objects in amber or ivory on her personal lathe. Maria Fedorovna’s activities thus present an interesting corrective



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to many assumptions about both women patrons and amateur aristocratic artists at the turn of the eighteenth century. Neither the modest dilettante content with private successes, nor the aspirant professional forced to contend with innumerable obstacles, she compels us to reconsider the tendency to position women artists of her day at one of the two poles. Maria Fedorovna was third in a distinguished line of German princesses who married heirs to the Russian throne. Her mother-in-law, Catherine the Great, was of German birth, and had ascended the Russian throne only by usurping her husband, Peter III, in 1762. The first wife of Maria Fedorovna’s husband, Princess Wilhelmina Luisa of Hesse-Darmstadt (who became Natalia Alekseevna after her marriage), was also of German royal blood. When Natalia Alekseevna died in childbirth in 1776, Catherine the Great again looked to Germany for a second wife for her son, choosing on this occasion Princess Sophia Dorothea Augusta Luisa of Württemberg, who took the name Maria Fedorovna on her conversion to the Russian Orthodox faith. Coincidence alone is unlikely to account for the fact that Catherine twice chose a German wife for her son. Her desire to strengthen allegiances with the German royal houses apart, Catherine would have been aware of Maria Fedorovna’s upbringing in the sober morality and firm ethical values of the Prussian Protestant faith, and may have welcomed these as fitting qualities in the consort of the heir to the Russian throne. Indeed, when Maria Fedorovna was presented by her future husband with a list of fourteen instructions concerning the behaviour he expected of her at the Russian court, she readily accepted them, but later pointed out that these were values which had been inculcated in her since childhood, and that only Paul’s unhappy first marriage compelled him to remind her of them.4 Such statements are of more than passing interest. Rather, they point to a loyal woman who was both proud of her moral and family values and keenly aware of her position at court, and whose embrace of her gendered role of supportive wife and devoted mother sets the context in which her artistic endeavour has to be assessed.5 Maria Fedorovna married Paul in September 1776, and within fifteen months gave birth to the first of ten children, the future Alexander I. To mark the occasion Catherine the Great presented the young couple with the estate of Pavlovsk, which then comprised two villages, a couple of royal hunting lodges and approximately 900 acres of crown land. Two timber residences were hastily erected, but these were soon insufficient for the royal couple’s needs. Thus it was that a new palace was commissioned from Charles Cameron, the Scottish neoclassical architect who had already carried out acclaimed work for Catherine at her palace at Tsarskoe Selo.6 Construction began in 1781. The same year, on the Empress’s command, Paul and Maria Fedorovna embarked on a lengthy tour of Europe under the pseudonyms of the Comte and Comtesse du Nord, ostensibly to familiarise themselves with the culture of Europe’s haut monde and to promote Russian interests abroad,7 but with the equally important aim of cementing relations with the Austrian court. Emperor Josef II of Austria, as



Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts 73


anxious as Catherine to effect a rapprochement between their two countries, wrote to his brother: ‘There should be no doubt left in [the Imperial couple’s] minds as to the unity of this family’s convictions as regards their persons and Russia as a whole; nor as to the strength and constancy of our sentiments towards them, now and in the future.’8 To the great benefit of later historians, the tour was accompanied by extensive correspondence between members of the travelling party and those overseeing developments at Pavlovsk, which offers an invaluable record of the extent to which both partners, but Maria Fedorovna in particular, were involved in the planning and decoration of their future home. Maria Fedorovna’s main point of contact at Pavlovsk was Karl Küchelbecker, the director of works, to whom she addressed her major concerns. Thus Baron Andrei Nikolai, her private secretary, wrote to Küchelbecker in January 1782, ‘The Grand Duchess has asked me to let you know that she is extremely dissatisfied with the rarity of news about Pavlovsk. . . . Do not forget that there is not one scrap of paper there which hasn’t concerned her Highness, and remember that you cannot bring her greater pleasure than by sending frequent news of Pavlovsk.’9 Nor was Maria Fedorovna intimidated by the favour which Catherine the Great had bestowed on Cameron. On the contrary, she was determined to exert her authority over the decorative scheme at Pavlovsk, even if it meant taking a firm hand with the architect. Thus she wrote in a letter worth quoting at length: Do remember, my good Küchelbecker, that I insist that only pale colours be used in the dining room. I want nothing garish, and I believe that we had decided that the frieze should be of a delicate pink, the background colour of the walls apple green, the background colour of one medallion pale pink or blue and the other lilac. I recall even that I wanted the backgrounds of the two medallions in the same colour, but Cameron would not have it. In the name of God, dear friend, endeavour to make sure that it has a Christian air. You know well enough from experience that gentleness is lost on Cameron, so tell him quite bluntly that his conduct is insupportable and that he should take care, as you are warning him as a friend that we shall look to him no longer.10 The dialogue between patron and architect became increasingly fraught and led, eventually, to work on some of Cameron’s most important rooms coming to a halt. Yet the relationship never broke down completely, and Cameron seized the opportunity presented by the Imperial couple’s travels in Europe to request objets d’art to complement his work. In 1781, for example, he wrote: In the corridor around the Dome drawing room there are to be twentyeight niches holding vases, statues, busts and other antique objects. . . . Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess should not miss this opportunity



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Maria Fedorovna duly responded, purchasing adornments for Pavlovsk which ranged from sculptures and paintings to antique bas-reliefs, porphyry columns and silk from the renowned Lyons silk manufactory (the latter following her insistent requests for the exact dimensions of the rooms which they were to furnish).12 Diplomatic gifts which she and her husband received during their tour, most famously the Gobelins and Savonnerie tapestries and the Sèvres toilet set that Louis XVI presented in 1782, were also incorporated into Pavlovsk’s interior scheme.13 Both the Grand Duke and his wife took pains throughout their journey to acquaint themselves with sites of cultural and archaeological interest, and to visit artists in their studios. Thus they ventured to Herculaneum and Pompeii in the company of Sir William Hamilton, English envoy to the Neapolitan court and a notable connoisseur of classical antiquities, while the artists they visited (and from whom they commissioned works) included Pompeo Batoni, Philip Hackert and Angelica Kauffmann in Rome and, in Paris, Jean-Antoine Houdon, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and, probably, Claude Joseph Vernet and Hubert Robert. The Imperial couple’s erudition and urbanity did not pass without comment. In the words of Le Chevalier Du Coudray: ‘M. the Comte and Mme the Comtesse du Nord have surprised everyone with their extensive knowledge of all the arts and trades. In our factories they enter into the tiniest details with the workers, using technical words and employing artistic terms as well as the craftsmen.’14 By the time the Imperial couple returned to Pavlovsk in November 1782, Maria Fedorovna had established herself as an important conduit of European fashion and design. Indeed, as her many purchases were installed in the palace, it became apparent that the Grand Duchess was becoming something of a taste-maker, her patronage of painters such as Kauffmann and of craftsmen such as the Parisian furniture-maker Henri Jacob and the German cabinetmaker David Roentgen greatly boosting the artists’ reputations among the court-watching Russian nobility, as well as abroad.15 Yet – as is the case with so many great patrons – Maria Fedorovna never rested on her laurels, content to reside with earlier purchases or decorative schemes which gradually became démodé. Never was this more apparent than after the central block of the palace at Pavlovsk was badly damaged in a fire of 1803. While restoring the original decorative schemes in some rooms – an act entirely understandable of a woman who had lost her husband in tragic circumstances just two years before (Paul had been assassinated in 1801), and for whom the decoration of the palace had been a key part of their shared life – Maria Fedorovna also readily considered new ideas proposed by Andrei Voronikhin, the Russian architect appointed to oversee the restoration.16 Thus she accepted the sculptures of eagles which Voronikhin proposed for the Italian Hall, though



of acquiring all the bas-reliefs and ornaments to be used to embellish the niches.11


she rejected his original designs for male herms in the same room in favour of female caryatids,17 and took a keen interest in how these were executed: ‘On the orders of Her Imperial Majesty, eight new eagles and as many caryatids have been made and gilded, then remade differently and partly regilded.’18 She also accepted Voronikhin’s introduction of bronze Egyptian figures in place of the original statues of the months in the Lower Vestibule, marking the first occasion on which a Russian architect incorporated Egyptian motifs in his work. Maria Fedorovna was clearly an exacting patron, for in the Tapestry Studio, ‘on the orders of Her Imperial Majesty, two large moulded ornaments, newly made, have been broken up and remade in different fashion’.19 Yet her willingness to listen to Voronikhin’s often innovative ideas at a time when other women in mourning might have chosen solely to recreate familiar surroundings points to her desire to remain at the forefront of fashions in interior design. What is more, as Voronikhin’s involvement at Pavlovsk intimates, in the early years of the nineteenth century Maria Fedorovna increasingly turned away from the attractions of foreign artists and craftsmen in order to patronise those working on Russian soil. Thus the three new interiors which Voronikhin designed at Pavlovsk were furnished with chairs and sofas from the St Petersburg workshops of Heinrich Gambs and Friedrich Hagemann, and decorated with chimney pieces in Kalkan jasper from the Imperial stonecutting factory in Ekaterinburg; Maria Fedorovna visited another stone-cutting factory, in Peterhof, in 1806 and 1809, and selected vases made of different Russian stones; the famous Pavlovsk dinner services by foreign firms such as Sèvres, Wedgwood and Spode were complemented by pieces from the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg; and the majority of the textiles which appeared in the palace from the early nineteenth century onwards were either gifts, or were woven or embroidered by Russian women working in the educational or charitable institutions which Maria Fedorovna managed after the death of Catherine the Great.20 Such a shift in focus from Western European to Russian-based work can be partly attributed to the fact that Maria Fedorovna never again undertook a foreign tour as extensive as that of 1781–2, and would have lost touch with developments abroad. Yet by the early 1800s, the policy initiated by Peter the Great a century earlier of inviting foreign artists and craftsmen to work in Russia had created a vibrant and well-established network of workshops and studios on Russian soil. Moreover, Russian patrons were gaining confidence in the abilities of their country’s native artists and artisans who, since the establishment of the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1757, had had the benefit of a state-funded institution which offered intensive training in the applied and decorative arts, as well as in the ‘higher’ genres of painting, sculpture and architecture.21 From 1762, the Academy also staged exhibitions, which after the opening of its new premises in 1814 became regular and prominent social events, and it acted as a mediator for both public and private commissions



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in the arts. Indeed, by the early decades of the nineteenth century, such was the interest surrounding the Academy, its exhibitions and its successful alumni that Russia’s first forays in artistic journalism began to appear in the periodical press.22 Maria Fedorovna was no stranger to the Academy: she studied with one of its professors, as discussed below, and encouraged her daughters to present examples of their work.23 At the same time, she took seriously her duty to study the culture of her adoptive country, hoping to impress her husband with her efforts to master the Russian language in the early years of their marriage,24 and holding literary and musical evenings at Pavlovsk which attracted literati as celebrated as the writer and historian Nikolai Karamzin, the poets Nikolai Gnedich and Vasily Zhukovsky, and the playwright and fabulist Ivan Krylov. Perhaps it was thus not convenience alone which compelled Maria Fedorovna to turn to local artists and craftsmen to fulfil the decorative requirements of her palace, but also her growing awareness and appreciation of Russia’s efforts – immortalised in the writing of the ‘national poet’ Alexander Pushkin – to nurture a cultural life of its own. At this point we turn to consider Maria Fedorovna’s own practice as an artist. Like so many of her peers, she had been given drawing lessons since childhood, and was proficient in the media and genres of art which were expected of her sex. Witness her signed drawing of flowers of 1787, whose still-life subject and pastel technique were both considered fitting endeavours for well-bred women of her time.25 Her assured draughtsmanship is particularly evident in the extraordinary series of drawings of architectural monuments at Pavlovsk and Tsarskoe Selo by the miniaturist François Viollier which she copied onto parchment in 1789, and which were later mounted onto buttons and presented to Catherine the Great.26 But the Grand Duchess was soon extending her horizons as an artist, taking lessons with the German medallist and engraver Karl Leberecht, who was elected a professor at the St Petersburg Academy in 1794. (Maria Fedorovna was working long before there were any institutionalised opportunities for women to train as artists in Russia, but securing appropriate training clearly posed no problem for one of her social status.)27 Having mastered the necessary skills, she went on to produce a series of engravings, medals, cameos and objets d’art in a variety of semiprecious stones. Consideration of an artist in her position inevitably raises questions as to whether the work was all her own hand. While it is impossible in Maria Fedorovna’s case to draw firm conclusions, witnesses at the time attested to the autonomy of her work. The Pavlovsk librarian and secretary François-Germain de Lafermière (1737–96), for example, wrote that his mistress would heed Leberecht’s views while she was carrying out the initial wax models, but when she moved on to carve the finished works in stone, ‘her teacher would not dare to interfere, and his entire responsibility consisted only in handing her the necessary tools’.28 Maria Fedorovna herself was also anxious to clarify exactly which components of some of the more elaborate items had been carved or




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On the pediment of the temple is a cameo of the Grand Duke mounted in clear glass on which I painted a trophy in grisaille. . . . In the middle of the temple is an eight-sided altar made of amber and ivory; on the central one my monogram in a medallion painted on glass and mounted in amber; on the other, medallions of my seven children . . . I painted all the children’s monograms in roses and myrtle; mine is in small blue flowers. . . .The writing set is of amber in antique form, the penknife, the paperknife, the pencil and seal handle are all in amber and made by me; I even engraved the monogram of the Grand Duke in steel for the cachet.29 Even taking into account Maria Fedorovna’s pride and the possible partisanship of Lafermière, the forcefulness of such statements offers persuasive evidence that she was capable of working independently of any other professional hand. Her work is in evidence throughout Pavlovsk (as well as appearing in other collections both in Russia and abroad), be it in the form of ornamental pieces such as miniature decorative obelisks, carved and painted adornments for furniture such as firescreens, or turned and carved work for inkstands and chalices. Thus she furnished a mahogany veneer firescreen designed by the architect Vincenzo Brenna and produced by the Gambs workshop with turned ivory columns and vases, a cameo of her husband in a gilt bronze medallion as well as other cameos in papier mâché, and a drawing on opaline glass. Most striking of all are the portraits of members of her family, including cameos which were reproduced by both Russian and foreign firms,30 and various versions of her famous drawing of the profiles of her children (Figure 17) – one of the many signifiers of Maria Fedorovna’s role as patron, artist, wife, mother and Imperial consort which appear in Johann Baptist Lampi the Elder’s portrait of the Grand Duchess of 1795 (see Figure 16 above). This drawing was engraved, modelled as cameos and carved as a bas-relief in plaster and in marble, with Catherine the Great sending one of the engravings to the Encyclopédiste Baron von Grimm, one of the Empress’s agents for the purchase of works of art in France.31 There is perhaps more to this domestic iconography than simply a wife and mother’s concern to record the countenance of her immediate family. Devoted to her children, Maria Fedorovna was dismayed when her two eldest, Alexander and Konstantin, were removed from her care to be educated under the watchful eye of Catherine the Great at Tsarskoe Selo. The pain at this separation was exacerbated when she was unable to see either child for fourteen months during her long European tour, at the start of which Alexander was nearly four and Konstantin just two years old. Adding insult to injury, Catherine later chided Maria Fedorovna for being too emotional around her children.32 The Grand Duchess frequently presented Catherine with examples of her work



painted by her. Thus in a letter to her mother describing a miniature ivory temple atop a writing table produced by the workshop of Heinrich Gambs, she wrote:

Figure 17 Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, Profile Image of the Children of Paul I, pencil, watercolour and gouache on frosted glass, 7 1/16 ⫻ 8 ¼ in (18 ⫻ 21 cm), Pavlovsk Palace Museum, St Petersburg.

which bore portraits of Maria Fedorovna’s husband, children or of Catherine herself. In 1781, for example, she gave her mother-in-law a cameo which portrayed the Empress as the Greek goddess Minerva (Figure 18),33 and this was followed by cameos bearing single and double portraits of Maria Fedorovna’s husband and sons. Underlying the ostensible affection of Maria Fedorovna for her mother-in-law which such gifts were seen to display is perhaps a more subtle message, in which the Grand Duchess was quietly reminding the Empress of her attachment to her sons, and rebuking the older woman for keeping them apart. Whatever the family politics which lay behind Maria Fedorovna’s artistic enterprise, the question remains how she viewed herself as an artist. She was not short of role models among professional women artists. Apart from Angelica Kauffmann, whom she had met in Rome and whose paintings she purchased and copied, the Grand Duchess was acquainted with Marie Louise Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the celebrated French portraitist whose intimacy with Marie Antoinette had forced her to flee France after the French Revolution, and who subsequently settled in St Petersburg from 1795 to 1801. There, VigéeLebrun established a thriving practice portraying members of the Russian aristocracy and the Imperial family, including Maria Fedorovna and her





Figure 18 Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna, Portrait of Catherine II in the Image of Minerva, 1789, cameo, porcelain-like paste, 2 ¾ ⫻ 1 15/16 in (7 ⫻ 5 cm), Pavlovsk Palace Museum, St Petersburg. (This is a copy of Maria Fedorovna’s original cameo, which was carved in pink and grey jasper.)

daughters. Indeed, in the famous Self-Portrait which Vigée-Lebrun presented to the St Petersburg Academy on her election as an honorary free associate in 1800, the artist chose to depict herself at work on a portrait of Maria Fedorovna (by then Empress of Russia), electing perhaps to show herself labouring over such a prestigious commission to broadcast the extent of her success. As with Kauffmann, Maria Fedorovna owned examples of Vigée-Lebrun’s work, whose drawings feature in bound volumes in the Pavlovsk library. Perhaps of even greater importance than Kauffmann or Vigée-Lebrun as a role model for Maria Fedorovna was Marie-Anne Collot, the remarkable French sculptor who had accompanied her master, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, to St Petersburg in 1766 when Falconet was commissioned by Catherine to sculpt an equestrian



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monument to Peter the Great.34 Collot’s work in Russia, which included not only busts of Catherine, Paul and many noble dignitaries but also the head for the equestrian statue of Peter, was met with such acclaim that she became the first known woman to be elected a member of the Imperial Academy of Arts.35 Her prowess in sculpture, a medium thought even more difficult for a woman than painting, may well have provided inspiration to Maria Fedorovna, whose arrival in St Petersburg coincided with Collot’s stay. For all these shining precedents, however, it is difficult to conclude that Maria Fedorovna harboured similar ambitions for her art as those of the three professional artists cited above. Whether as Grand Duchess, Empress or Dowager Empress, she never lost sight of her responsibilities as dutiful wife, doting mother or reverent widow, and was anxious to maintain her femininity and to meet the expectations of protocol. (The Grand Duchess won praise for continuing to wear full formal dress and corsets during her pregnancies.)36 Moreover, in the early years of Alexander’s reign, she firmly upheld certain traditional mores which she felt were being undermined. In the words of Roderick McGrew, ‘Her society in the years following Paul’s death in 1801 became a centre for conservative values in Alexander’s more liberal court.’37 Richard Wortman too has outlined her role in inscribing family loyalty and marital love into the public image of the Imperial family during the reign of both Alexander I and his successor, her third son Nicholas I.38 Thus the Dowager Empress clearly subscribed to traditional family values which defined a woman’s place largely within the domestic sphere. Family concerns apart, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Maria Fedorovna became involved in charitable activities to an extent that has led one scholar to conclude that she ‘initiated the tradition of secular charity as a woman’s concern in Russia’.39 Around 1790 she founded the first institution for the deaf and dumb in Russia, and in 1797 she opened her first orphanage, followed by other charitable organisations and foster homes. In this respect, the Grand Duchess’s activities enforce those rhetorical strategies identified by Adele Lindenmeyr and others which extended women’s altruistic responsibilities in the home to include pious acts and charitable work.40 From 1796 when, on the death of Catherine the Great, she took over the direction of the Smolny Institute for Gentlewomen, Maria Fedorovna also concerned herself with women’s education.41 The recipient of a better education than was usual for women of her time and class,42 she clearly welcomed the expansion of opportunities for women, and promoted many women’s training institutes.43 However, as Barbara Alpern Engel and others point out (and as I have mentioned elsewhere), such activities must again be seen in context for, while promoting women’s education, Maria Fedorovna still maintained that women must observe their proper place. Thus in 1804 she defined the duties of the graduates of the Smolny Institute ‘as daughters, to be obedient and respectful; as wives, to be faithful, virtuous, tender, modest, diligent and useful . . . to be conscientious about the order, comfort and





well-being of [their] household, and as mothers to try to combine warmth towards children with sensible concern about their future well-being’.44 Her art, therefore, cannot be construed as symptomatic of the attempts of a frustrated woman to contest the social, professional or familial constraints imposed on her sex. Rather, it suggests a talented woman engaging in an occupation which was entirely acceptable within polite society, even if she did develop that pastime in more novel ways than was usually the case. Maria Fedorovna died in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1828, at the age of 69. Such was the esteem for her charitable and educational work that a special governmental division, the Department of the Institutions of Empress Maria, was established to manage the schools and charitable institutions which she had founded or sponsored. There was also wide respect for this stately woman who had nurtured ten children (five of whom survived her), remained loyal to the memory of her husband, despite his amorous transgressions and mental instability, and made an indisputable contribution to Russian cultural life. Her activities greatly illuminate our understanding of the role and experience of women in the higher echelons of Russian society, as well as that of women in eighteenth-century Russia in general, both of which are the subjects of increasingly focused research.45 But Maria Fedorovna’s example also encourages us to reconsider the relationship between upper-class women and material culture beyond the Russian context alone. Blessed with a good education, an enquiring mind and discerning taste, but ever mindful of her status, Maria Fedorovna succeeded in negotiating her ambivalent position as both proactive patron and compliant consort at one of Europe’s most splendid courts. At the same time, she developed a distinct artistic identity of her own by seeking and acquiring excellent artistic tuition, and by having the pertinacity to operate in materials and techniques which were then not readily accessible to women of her class. Her example therefore suggests a more nuanced picture of the experience of women artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries than that of patronised amateurs or struggling outcasts alone. For rather than being constrained by her sex and her social status, Maria Fedorovna used her position to gain access to the most influential of Russia’s cultural spaces, not least the Imperial Academy of Arts, and in doing so reconciled and excelled in her different roles as Imperial consort, artist, and an avid patron and consumer of the arts.

Notes 1 Gen Doy, ‘Hidden from Histories: Women History Painters in Early NineteenthCentury France’, in Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 74. 2 Doy, p. 78.



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3 See Lidia I. Iovleva, ed., Iskusstvo zhenskogo roda (exhibition catalogue, Moscow: State Tret’iakov Gallery, 2002); and Rosalind P. Blakesley, ‘A Century of Women Painters, Sculptors, and Patrons from the Time of Catherine the Great’, in An Imperial Collection: Women Artists from the State Hermitage Museum, ed. Jordana Pomeroy, Rosalind P. Blakesley et al. (exhibition catalogue, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; London: Merrell Publishers, 2003), pp. 51–75. 4 For Paul’s instructions and Maria’s reaction to these, see Roderick E. McGrew, Paul I of Russia, 1754–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 99–104; and S. V. Mironenko and N. S. Tret’iakov, eds., Imperatritsa Maria Fedorovna (Pavlovsk: Art-Palas, 2000), pp. 10, 21. 5 For the way in which the German princesses exposed the Russian court to modern European views on the role of wives and mothers, see Richard Wortman, ‘The Russian Empress as Mother’, in The Family in Imperial Russia: New Lines of Historical Research, ed. David L. Ransel (Urbana, Chicago and London: University of Illinois Press, 1978), pp. 60, 63. 6 For Cameron’s work in Russia, see Dimitri Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1996). Cameron’s work at Pavlovsk is discussed on pp. 117–65. 7 Catherine gave firm instructions ‘not to spare money, but to make this journey through Europe as splendid as it was interesting’. Quoted in A. N. Guzanov, ‘Khudozhestvennye kollektsii Pavlovskogo dvortsa i puteshestvie grafa i grafini Severnykh’, in Chastnoe kollektsionirovanie v Rossii, ed. I. E. Danilova (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv imeni A. S. Pushkina, 1995), XXVII , p. 65. 8 Joseph and Leopold von Toscana, Ihr Brief Wechsel von 1781 bis 1790 (Vienna, 1872), 1, p. 332. Quoted in Emmanuel Ducamp, ed., Pavlovsk, I, The Palace and the Park (Paris: Alain de Gourcuff Éditeur, 1993), p. 28. 9 Letter from Andrei L. Nikolai to Karl I. Küchelbecker, 15 January 1782, from the Pavlovsk Palace Archives. Quoted in Mironenko and Tret’iakov, p. 38. 10 Letter from Maria Fedorovna to Karl I. Küchelbecker. Quoted in Ducamp, I, p. 47. 11 Pavlovsk Palace Archives, 1781, no. 35.5, folio 53. Quoted in Ducamp, ed., Pavlovsk, II, The Collections (Paris: Alain de Gourcuff Éditeur, 1993), p. 69. 12 See correspondence cited in Guzanov, ‘Khudozhestvennye kollektsii Pavlovskogo dvortsa’, pp. 68, 75n21; and Suzanne Massie, Pavlovsk: the Life of a Russian Palace (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1990), pp. 29–34. 13 For the hanging of these tapestries at Pavlovsk, see Ducamp, I, p. 53. For Paul and Maria Fedorovna’s visit to the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, see Pierre Ennès, ‘The Visit of the Comte and Comtesse du Nord to the Sèvres Manufactory’, Apollo (March 1989): 150–6. Several sources state that it was Marie Antoinette who presented the toilet set, but Ennès has established that it was officially a gift from the King (p. 152). 14 Le Chevalier Du Coudray, publication of 1782, cited in Ennès, p. 221. 15 For Maria Fedorovna’s patronage of Angelica Kauffmann, see N. Stadnichuk, ‘Angelika Kaufman i Pavlovsk’, in Pavlovsk, imperatorskii dvorets: stranitsy istorii, ed. Iu. V. Mudrov (St Petersburg: Art-Palas, 1997), pp. 347–53. For Kauffman’s other Russian patrons, see L. Iu. Savinskaia, ‘Russkie kollektsionery zapadnoevropeiskoi zhivopisi 1780-kh godov. Vkus i stil’’, in Danilova, p. 59. 16 For Voronikhin’s work at Pavlovsk, see Alexei Guzanov, ‘Andrei Voronikhin’, in Stroganoff: the Palace and Collections of a Russian Noble Family, ed. Penelope Hunter-Stiebel (exhibition catalogue, Portland Art Museum; New York, Harry N. Abrams, 2000), pp. 177–85; and Massie, pp. 68–76.





17 See Guzanov, ‘Andrei Voronikhin’, p. 178. 18 State Central Historical Archives, St Petersburg, stack 493, inventory 7, entry 100. Quoted in Ducamp, I, p. 63. 19 State Central Historical Archives, St Petersburg, stack 493, inventory 7, entry 100. Quoted in Ducamp, I, p. 64. 20 For the Russian furniture, textiles, porcelain and stone vases at Pavlovsk, see Ducamp, I, p. 65, and II, pp. 98–102, 122–4, 144–5 and 197–201. 21 For the Academy’s pedagogy in the eighteenth century, see Nina Moleva and Ellii Beliutin, Pedagogicheskaia sistema Akademii khudozhestv XVIII veka (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1956). 22 See Alexey Makhrov, ‘The Pioneers of Russian Art Criticism’, Slavonic and East European Review, 81: 4 (2003): 614–33. 23 In 1796 four of Maria’s daughters had submitted examples of their painting, drawing and sculpture to the Academy. See P. N. Petrov, Sbornik materialov dlia istorii Imperatorskoi S-Peterburgskoi Akademii khudozhestv za sto let ee sushchestvovaniia, I (St Petersburg, 1864), pp. 351–2. 24 For the letter in which Maria Fedorovna proudly informed her husband of her first translation from French to Russia, see Mironenko and Tret’iakov, p. 34. 25 See Gosudarstvennyi Russkii muzei, Zhivopis’ XVIII vek: katalog, I (St Petersburg: Palace Editions, 1998), p. 123. 26 See lot no. 424, The Russian Sale (Sotheby’s, London, 1 December 2004), pp. 262–3; and Ducamp, II, p. 13. 27 Russian women first had access to studio classrooms in 1842, at the St Petersburg Drawing School for Auditors which had been founded in 1840 by the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. See Alison Hilton, ‘Domestic Crafts and Creative Freedom: Russian Women’s Art’, in Russia, Women, Culture, ed. Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 349. For further information on the artistic training available to Russian women in the nineteenth century, see Hilton, pp. 348–54; and Blakesley, ‘A Century of Women Painters’, pp. 62–75. 28 Letter from F. Lafermière to Prince S. R. Vorontsov, in Arkhiv Kn. Vorontsova, XXIX, p. 281. Quoted in D. F. Kobeko, ‘Imperatritsa Mariia Fedorovna, kak khudozhnitsa i liubitel’nitsa iskusstva’, Vestnik iziashchnykh iskusstv, II, 6 (1884): 402. 29 Quoted in Massie, pp. 51–2. 30 For copies made by Wedgwood of Maria Fedorovna’s cameos, see Galina B. Andreeva, ed., Nezabyvaemaia Rossiia: russkie i Rossiia glazami britantsev XVII–XIX vek (exhibition catalogue, Moscow: State Tret’iakov Gallery, 1997), pp. 78–9. 31 See A. Vasileva, ‘Velikaia kniaginia Mariia Fedorovna – khudozhnitsa’, in Mudrov, p. 336. 32 Ducamp, I, pp. 37–8. 33 This cameo was after a medal which had been struck in France at the time of Catherine’s coronation. See Anne Odom and Liana Paredes Arend, A Taste for Splendor: Russian Imperial and European Treasures from the Hillwood Museum (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 1998), p. 142. 34 For the history of this commission, including Collot’s role, see Alexander M. Schenker, The Bronze Horseman: Falconet’s Monument to Peter the Great (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 35 For Collot’s career in Russia, see Irina G. Etoeva, ‘“Brilliant Proof of the Creative Abilities of Women”: Marie-Anne Collot in Russia’, in Pomeroy, Blakesley et al., pp. 77–85.



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36 Liudmila Markina, ‘Izobrazheniia imperatritsy Marii Fedorovny v sobraniiakh Germanii’, Pinakoteka, 10–11 (2000): 96. 37 McGrew, p. 95. 38 Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 1, From Peter the Great to the Death of Nicholas I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 250–4. 39 Wortman, p. 250. 40 See Adele Lindenmeyr, Poverty is Not a Vice: Charity, Society, and the State in Imperial Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 41 The Smolny Institute, officially known as the Imperial Society for the Education of Well-Born Young Women, had been founded by Catherine the Great in 1764. 42 See Mironenko and Tret’iakov, pp. 24, 26. 43 For brief mention of Maria Fedorovna’s spur to women’s education in Russia, see Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism 1860–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 4. 44 Quoted in Barbara A. Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 24. See also Blakesley, ‘A Century of Women Painters’, p. 60. 45 See Isolde Thyrêt, Between God and Tsar: Religious Symbolism and the Royal Women of Muscovite Russia (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001); and Wendy Rosslyn, ed., Women and Gender in 18th-Century Russia (London: Ashgate, 2003).




Pride and Prejudice: Eighteenthcentury Women Sculptors and their Material Practices Marjan Sterckx

The Graces smiling wait on her command, And ease the labour of their mistress’ hand. From her skill’d touch, immortal gods improve, And senseless blocks are starting into love. The dullest clods of earth a soul acquire, And frigid marble breathes celestial fire; Her chisel wond’rous more than Orpheus lute, Can soften rocks, and deify a brute. ‘On the Sculpture of the Honourable Mrs. A. Damer’ (1785)1 Since the 1970s, women artists have been a central focus of art-historical research. Female sculptors, however, and especially those who are not American, remain almost as underrepresented in current scholarship as they do in the artists’ dictionaries of their day. In 1830, for example, the only woman sculptor to be included in Allan Cunningham’s Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors was Anne Damer (1748–1828) (Figure 19), just as some three centuries earlier, Properzia de’ Rossi (c.1490–c.1530) appeared as the sole representative of her sex in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite (1550–68). Nevertheless, Cunningham was dimly aware that Damer followed in the footsteps of a number of other (albeit, in his view, less illustrious) sculptresses as his inclusion of the following quotation from Horace Walpole demonstrates: ‘Mrs Damer . . . has chosen a walk more difficult and far more uncommon than painting. The annals of statuary record few artists of the fair sex, and not one that I recollect of any celebrity.’2 Despite Walpole’s claim, women were working in the three-dimensional arts in the period between the publication of Vasari’s Vite and Cunningham’s Lives.3 Throughout the eighteenth century their number grew significantly, although women probably never represented more than 1 per cent of the profession as a whole. Artists’ dictionaries record a total of around 40 sculptresses active between 1660 and 1750, and about twice that number between 1750 and 1830. 86



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Figure 19 Richard Cosway, Anne Seymour Damer, watercolor on ivory, 1785. London: National Portrait Gallery.

In reality, there were probably even more. 1748 might be seen as a symbolic turning point in this insufficiently documented, narrative of growth and expansion. It was then that Patience Wright-Lovell (1725–86), an American, married a Quaker, whose wealth enabled her to buy modelling materials. During the same year, the French sculptor Marie-Elisabeth Eduin (n.d.) was active in Paris and two of the most famous and productive early sculptresses were born: Anne Damer and the French woman Marie-Anne Collot (1748–1821). These four artists are representative of a small group of fascinating and ambitious women who devoted themselves to sculpture and the pursuit of public visibility in the art capitals of Europe. Several of these women won prestigious commissions and medals. Elizabeth Berkeley (1750–1828), margravine



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of Anspach, Maria Denman (1776–1861) and Sybella Bullock (n.d.), for example, were awarded silver medals at the Society of Arts in 1806, 1807 and 1825 respectively. Others were successful in gaining royal commissions: Anna-Maria Pfründt (1642–1713) from the Viennese court; Marie-Anne Collot from Catherine the Great and the Dutch court; while, in Madrid, Luisa Roldán (1652–1706) was appointed Sculptor to the Bedchamber by Charles II and Sculptor to the King by Philip V. This essay focuses on this small but significant first generation of sculptresses, who were active before women were admitted to the art academies at the end of the nineteenth century, in order to illustrate how they struggled with conventional understandings of their practice. As Walpole’s comment on Damer’s career indicates, by the eighteenth century sculpture had long been regarded as a male discipline, not least because of the strength and skill needed to work materials such as stone. Traditionally, the term ‘sculpture’ refers to two distinct working practices: the carving or hacking of hard materials such as stone and wood (per via di levare) and the modelling of soft materials, particularly clay and wax (per via di porre). These practices, the sculpting of stone and wood, versus the modelling of clay and wax, are respectively associated with the features hard, public, monumental versus soft, private, intimate. In turn they were and sometimes are still, demarcated along gender lines: being commonly associated with the masculine and the feminine. The cultural and physical obstacles faced by sculptresses were many and varied, but not insurmountable. As the lives and careers of the women discussed in this essay reveal, the gendered assumptions that governed sculpting practice in the period could be manipulated in diverse and significant ways.

The hard work of sculpting In his description of work of the French sculptor Julie Charpentier (1770–1845) – the only woman commissioned to make bas-reliefs for the triumphal column at Place Vendôme in Paris and for the monumental elephant fountain commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte and who exhibited in Paris from 1787 to 1824 – Tønnes Christian Bruun-Neergaard makes precisely this distinction between both sculpting modes and links these with gender: They gave me the names of some other French and foreign women, but they all restricted themselves to modelling, never daring to put the chisel to hard marble to create a statue or a bas-relief. . . . I was quite interested to read the invitation to come and see a bas-relief executed in marble by a lady.4 Charpentier’s distinctiveness as a sculptress is still more remarkable for Bruun-Neergaard because of the (daring) manner and (superior, hard) material with which she worked (Figure 20). Some 90 years later, Roscoe Mullins would view the paucity of women stone-carvers not as the result of a lack of



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Figure 20 Julie Charpentier, Le Dominiquin, marble, 1816–18. Paris: Louvre.

daring, but rather as a problem of biology: women’s ‘slighter physique’, he suggested, was simply inadequate to a discipline which ‘require[d] a firm grip of the tool, and strength of arm and wrist, to ensure good execution’.5 As a solution, Mullins suggested that female sculptresses should ‘get their marble work done for them’, a practice not unreasonable, he added, given that male sculptors frequently left this most heavy aspect of their work to their assistants. Indeed, many famous sculptors – male and female – throughout history devoted their creative energies to the early stage (small-scale and malleable) of modelling, leaving to their assistants the task of realising their designs in stone or bronze, which would be finished and signed by the artist. This workshop practice attests not only to the perceived primacy of mind over




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matter, or inventio over manual work, in contemporary sculpting practice, but also demonstrates that modelling was not necessarily considered to be of less creative value than carving. However, the response to assisted male and female sculptors differed greatly: whereas in the case of male sculptors assistance was viewed as a mark of success and prestige, with women, it was seen as a sign of their weakness and unsuitability for this artistic practice. Although several women did cut stone themselves, whether to prove that they could or because they could not afford to employ assistants, some, especially those of higher status, contracted out carving. After all, cultural prejudice and educational convention debarred all but the most determined from stonework and from the studios of male sculptors, where the necessary training was given.6 Employing assistants certainly enabled women to become sculptors without losing respectability, but left them, much more so than their male counterparts, susceptible to accusations of plagiarism. Long before the public debate (c. 1862) over the authority of Harriet Hosmer’s (1830–1908) monumental marble sculpture, Zenobia in Chains, Roldán, Collot, Damer and Marie d’Orléans (1813–1839) were all accused of attempting to pass themselves off as the authors of works that were not their own, on the grounds that their assistants helped with the most harsh aspects of the marble cutting.7 Cunningham clearly struggled with the issue of contracting out work in his account of Damer’s career and cast doubt on the many marble and stone sculptures she authored during her career, including an 8-foot statue of George III: ‘Of her own share in the execution of those works I cannot speak with certainty.’ Painfully aware of such accusations, Damer ‘resolved to prove in her latter days that she could carve as well as model’;8 she appeared in several engravings with a hammer and chisel in her hands and made public her desire to be buried – and so linked forever – with her sculpting tools. Several of Damer’s successors were subjected to similar criticism. D’Orléans, for example, author of a successful piece entitled Joan of Arc (1835–7) – first modelled in wax – was the satirical target of an anonymous four-act play published in La Mode (1838). The work, entitled ‘L’atelier d’une princesse ou Une réputation de Cour’, ridiculed d’Orléans by suggesting that she relied on an unacknowledged male sculptor not only to execute her work, but also to develop its style and subject matter. Some women did establish careers in stonework, however, even though they were known to collaborate with others. Eleanor Coade (1733–1821), for example, began a flourishing ‘manufactory’ in Lambeth in 1769, which made an extremely durable artificial stone she first called Lithodipyra, and later ‘Coade stone’.9 The 778 designs for sculptural decorations her manufactory offered to the public in 1784 had evidently not all been created by her. Although in the 1770s ‘Mrs Eleanor Coade, sculptor’ exhibited allegorical and mythological statues in artificial stone at the Society of Arts in her own name, she would later credit these statues as the creations of John Bacon and Thomas Banks in the showroom catalogue (1799). Among her many collaborator sculptor-designers



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were also women: the catalogue’s frontispiece shows a monumental group of six figures in Coade stone for the Pelican Insurance Office façade (London), which was designed by Diana Beauclerk (1734–1808), lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte.10 Other sculptresses preferred slightly softer, and consequently less durable, materials for their work per via di levare, such as sandstone, ivory, fruit stones or wood. Roldán won such acclaim for her sculptures in polychrome wood that a large family workshop was needed to produce all her commissions. Yet her reputation as an artist and her reputation as a woman were commonly perceived to be at odds. A number of Roldán’s contemporaries struggled to reconcile the ideal of the female artist with her monumental wooden images and mastery of the male nude, finding her smaller terracotta works more appropriate to ‘the delicacy of her gender’.11 Damer faced even harsher accusations of inappropriateness, as ‘The Damerian Apollo’ (1789), a satirical print published by William Holland, demonstrates.12 The wooden statue of Apollo which adorned the roof of London’s Drury Lane Theatre, credited (still without certainty) to Damer, was described in some detail in an account of a fire that destroyed the theatre (built in 1794 by Henry Holland) on 24 February 1809: ‘the flames burst out at the roof, and encircled the statue of Apollo. About a quarter before twelve, the statue, and part of the roof on which it stood, fell in with a terrible crash. This figure was made of wood, was seventeen feet high clear of the pedestal, and was strongly fortified with iron’ (Figure 21).13 If the sculpture was indeed by Damer (and if not, at least the subject was under discussion), then it was probably the first public statue (even of a nude man) by a woman to be displayed in London, and maybe even in Europe or the western world. This ambitious entry of a woman into an urban, public space may explain the vehemence of the Holland image. As Alison Yarrington points out, the Damer depicted in the cartoon is destructive and threatening; passionately, but recklessly, wielding her hammer and chisel, she seems ready to emasculate (exactly where both diagonals meet) her own version of the Apollo Belvedere and so destroy the genius of Art itself.14 The other sculpted bodies depicted in the print lack or hide their genitals and a young lady is visibly upset by the monumental male nude or, perhaps, by its violent creator.15 The satire grotesquely contrasts the strenuousness of Damer’s art to the weakness of her sex – she is pictured in feminine dress, with a slender waist and tiny feet and hands untouched by the hackwork and not capable of much destruction – to counter the threatening nature of her ‘masculine’ occupation and ambitions and emphasise the unfeminine nature of her work. While most sculptors engaged in carving and modelling, on the whole more in modelling than in carving, the romantic image of the sculptor as a craftsman hacking away at marble or stone, resisting pain, dirt and cold, confined the profession to one technique, one material and one sex. The enduring image of Michelangelo Buonarroti liberating the imprisoned figure from within




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Figure 21 Drury Lane Theatre with Apollo-statue (presumably by Anne Damer). Engraving published by Alexander Hogg in The Gentleman’s Pocket Magazine, 1 April 1795, with text ‘Drury Lane New Theatre in its present state’. V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum.

the marble by chipping away the superfluous stone exemplifies this persistent, restrictive and culturally determined construction of the sculptor. That this image was, in part, a fiction – Michelangelo also modelled in wax and clay – does not alter the fact that the link between sculpture and the carving of hard materials ensured that it continued to be viewed as masculine, despite the efforts of Damer, Collot, Coade and others.

The ‘feminine’ art of wax modelling Priscilla Wakefield included statuary and modelling as possible activities for women in her Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798) and cited Damer as proof that women had ‘only to apply their talents to it in order to excel’. Nevertheless, Wakefield, like Mullins and others, saw the hardness of some sculpting materials as a possible problem for female practitioners of the art: ‘If the resistance of marble and hard substances be too powerful for them to subdue, wax and the other materials of a softer nature, will easily yield to their impressions.’16 Such views remained firmly entrenched for the next century. The Art Journal for 1871, for instance, stated that ‘it is not strange that modelling in clay is tempting to their fair fingers’ and, in the 1920s, the German art critic Karl Scheffler would associate day modelling



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with the female sex. According to Scheffler, sculpture had been devalued as an art-form precisely because male sculptors were content to restrict themselves to what he called the ‘feminine’ practice of modelling rather than cutting stone.17 Women’s close association with modelling, especially wax modelling, dates back at least to the Middle Ages, when nuns made candles, wax flowers and small statues of saints and the Virgin Mary for convents and private chapels. This tradition continued through the seventeenth century; Placida Lamm (d. 1692) and Johanna Nepomucena Asam (fl. c.1710), both German, are notable practitioners of this art-form, which is still alive in some convents throughout Europe today.18 Such work has always existed outside the art-historical canon, but it is precisely its status as low, rather than high, art that has allowed women to enter the field and redefine it from within. The early history of photography provides an instructive comparison. That the relatively high number of female photographers in the mid-nineteenth century failed to generate undue concern was linked to the medium’s initial status as a ‘low’ art; the same might be said of wax modelling. Indeed, this ancient practice might be regarded as a precursor to photography, with which wax effigies share an aspiration to verisimilitude without idealisation. Such characteristics, which can demonstrate a failure, in artistic terms, to transform nature into culture pushed both media to the margins of artistic practice.19 Between 1660 and 1830, both male and female sculptors used soft materials as a preliminary medium in their work, but it is remarkable how many women restricted themselves almost exclusively to this medium.20 At least 50 (predominantly British and German) sculptresses, approximately 40 per cent of the total documented for the period under discussion, modelled almost solely in wax, while several prominent figures principally noted for their work in other media, including Damer, also used the medium only sporadically.21 While it is difficult to locate precisely the origins of the association of wax modelling with femininity, interiority and inferiority, it is clear that this artistic practice was open to women in ways that other art-forms were not. Although wax is fragile, fairly difficult to obtain and more expensive than clay, it is clean to work with and malleable; easy to prepare and preserve, it allows for modifications and hardens quickly without firing and cracking. Women working with this medium did not, therefore, require specialist tools or training or the physical strength or space needed for monumental stonework. Indeed, their work could be carried out in the home. As such, wax modelling provided an appropriately feminine means through which women could enter the masculine world of sculpture, and the remarkable growth in the number of professional sculptresses from the seventeenth century onwards must have been a direct result of their activity in wax modelling: approximately 80 per cent of sculptresses active after 1660 and born before 1700 worked in wax, a total that is almost exactly equivalent to the number of all recorded sculptresses working before 1660.




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In 1673, following the marriage of James II to Princess Mary of Modena, who is assumed to have introduced the craft to the seventeenth-century English court, two wax dolls arrived in England, and small-scale modelling in bread dough and wax became a popular pastime for gentlewomen. In his Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth Century (1901) George Paston wrote that ‘to model well in clay is considered as strong minded and anti-feminine, but to model badly in wax or bread is quite a feminine occupation’.22 Coloured wax sheets for modelling projects were sold in London, and several women offered instruction to female pupils, among them Mary Salmon (1650–1740), manager of ‘Mrs Salmon’s Royal Wax-Works’, whose handbill explained that she taught ‘the full art’.23 In 1731 the English-born Martha Gazley travelled to New York to set herself up as a modeller and instructor in the art of making ‘the following curious Works, viz. Artificial Fruit and Flowers, and other Wax-Work, Nuns-Work’ for ‘young Gentlewomen, or others . . . inclined to learn any or all the above-mentioned curious Works’. In 1749 Gazley would again travel from London to New York to exhibit fourteen rare effigies, including those of the Royal family of England. She tried to entice visitors by claiming, as The New York Gazette reported in August, that her ‘time in this town [would] be short’.24 While Salmon’s and Gazley’s pupils may have been content to model ‘Fruit and Flowers’, several women would push the boundaries of the medium to a more professional level. In Utrecht, the scholar, poet and artist Anna Maria van Schurman’s (1607–78) experiments led to the production of a number of small wax bas-relief portraits, including a self-portrait and representation of Martin Luther. Writing of this work in her autobiography Eucleria (1673), van Schurman noted that she ‘had to invent lots of things that she could not learn from anyone’.25 Some decades later in Bologna, Anna Manzolini-Morandi (1716–74) specialised in brilliant anatomical models which were used for medical research as an alternative to the illegal practice of dissection.26 Such was her reputation that Pope Benedict XIV commissioned her to develop a complete museum collection and gave her an income for life. Elsewhere in Europe, especially in Britain, women were establishing themselves as pioneers in the art of manufacturing life-like and dressed figures in wax, which were displayed to the public in popular, often touring, waxwork shows. One of the earliest of these exhibits by a female sculptor was that of London-based Mrs Mills (active c.1695), referred to as ‘the greatest artist in Europe’ in The Postman for 6 February 1696. The advertisement for her show read: Just finish’d and to be seen. The present Court of England in Wax, after (and as big as) Life . . . much exceeding that which was at the New Exchange tho’ both made by the most deservedly famous Mrs. Mills, whom in that Art, all ingenuous Persons own, had never yet an Equal. . . . To be seen from 9 in the Morn, till 9 at Night.27



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That the show was a commercial undertaking is clear from the advertised admission prices (sixpence, four pence and two pence) and Mrs Mills’ offer that ‘persons may have their Effigies made, or their deceas’d Friends on reasonable Terms’.28 But it was Mrs Salmon who was the most renowned of this first generation of female waxwork artists. Her huge waxwork exhibit, ‘Mrs. Salmon’s Royal Wax-Works’, comprising some 140 life-size figures ‘all made’ by her own hands, was first staged in 1693. Over the next century it travelled widely and continued to appear under her name until 1831.29 America’s first wax modeller, and probably that country’s first professional sculptor, was Patience Wright. Now known as the ‘founding mother of American sculpture’,30 Wright established a waxworks exhibition in New York City in 1771 before moving to London in 1775 after the waxworks were destroyed by fire.31 Despite her success, Wright’s career was affected by similar cultural prejudices to those that affected women like Damer, who worked within the still less acceptable realm of monumental or stone sculpture. An engraving entitled ‘Mrs Wright Finishing a busto’, published in the London Magazine in 1775, for example, found ample scope for satire in the artist’s ‘secretive’ technique of fashioning wax heads in her lap, concealing them under her apron while engaging her subjects and visitors in conversation.32 This image of Wright as a sexualised figure speaks to the perceived lowness and inappropriateness of the sculptress’s art. Attitudes in continental Europe were little different. When in 1779 Wright wrote to Benjamin Franklin, then resident in Paris, to enquire into the possibility of continuing her career in the French capital, she received the following reply: As to the exercise of your Art here, I am in doubt whether it would answer your expectations. Here are two or three who profess it and make a Show of their Works on the Boulevards; but it is not the Taste of Persons of Fashion to sit to these Artists for their Portraits; and both House Rent and Living at Paris are very expensive.33 Against Franklin’s advice, Wright did travel to Paris, where she completed a bust of him in 1781, before returning to the United States. Just four years before Wright’s arrival in Paris, Marie Grosholtz (1761–1850) (later Mme Tussaud) made her first wax figure. Tussaud would, of course, become famous for her ‘Chamber of Horrors’ – based on her uncle Curtius’s infamous ‘Caverne des Grands Voleurs’ – which was filled during the French Revolution with wax casts of the guillotined heads of the French nobility.34 In 1802 the now married Tussaud moved to England with most of the collection and one of her sons. Before settling in London in 1835, she toured the country with her ‘Grand European Cabinet of Figures’, exhibiting topical, and therefore temporary, figures of eminent persons as well as tableaux, which, in a complex merging of popular art-forms and the conventions of history painting and stagecraft, recreated important historical episodes.




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Tussaud’s waxworks may well have inspired her friend Mme Genlis to invent another eighteenth-century artistic entertainment: poses plastiques, a sculptural variant to tableaux vivants.35 In a reversal of the Pygmalion myth of the blank statue brought to life, this popular art-form used living motionless human bodies, powdered or painted entirely in white, to imitate marble statues. Although Tussaud was popular and influential, and despite her best efforts to assert the intellectual and historical value of her work, her waxworks were never considered seriously as art. However, some female wax modellers could find the acclaim Tussaud sought in the more respectable and permanent field of funerary statuary, notably for Westminster Abbey. Women’s involvement in the modelling of wax effigies commissioned for Westminster Abbey between 1686 and 1806 is impressive. Of the original fourteen figures, at least six were made by women – a testament to their fame and recognition of their expertise.36 A commission to complete a figure of Frances ‘la Belle’ Stuart for the Abbey – Stuart had stipulated in her will that she wished to have her ‘Effigie as well done in Wax as may bee’ – was gladly taken up by Mrs Goldsmith (active 1695–1703), a woman praised by the Daily Courant as being ‘Famous . . . for Waxwork’ (Figure 22).37 It is probable that she also made the effigies of William III and Mary II, which were purchased by the Abbey for £187 in 1725, but which may already have been displayed in 1695 in Goldsmith’s showroom.38 The last and one of the most lucrative of the Abbey’s effigies to be made was Catherine Andras’s (1776–1860) figure of Horatio Nelson. Andras, who had begun making wax dolls as a child for the toy-shop she and her three orphaned sisters kept in Bristol, was appointed ‘modeller in wax to Queen Charlotte’ in 1802. She was paid £104 14s for the Westminster Abbey effigy, which was commissioned, in part, to woo back crowds after the decision was made to house Nelson’s tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral. Andras’s work, for which Nelson was supposed to have sat, and given some of his own clothes, was considered a more authentic representation than that which appeared on the marble tomb. No less an authority than Lady Emma Hamilton would speak of it as a ‘most striking likeness’. Despite its popularity, however, no more effigies were to be commissioned by the Abbey, which increasingly faced opposition to its practice of exhibiting ‘waxen puppets’ for financial gain.39 Especially those displaying ‘the shoe-buckles worn by Lord Nelson, or a favourite “poll parrot” of the deceased lady’, both made by women, were criticised. The perceived incongruity between the Westminster statues and their setting was noted by the sculptor Joseph Nollekens (1737–1823): I wonder you keep such stuff: why, at Antwerp, where my father was born, they put such things in silks outside in the streets. I don’t mind going to Mrs Salmon’s Wax-work in Fleet Street, where mother Shipton gives you a kick as you are going out. Oh dear! You should not have such rubbish in the Abbey: and then for you to take money for this foolish thing.40



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Figure 22 Mrs Goldsmith, Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, 1703. Westminster Abbey, The Undercroft Museum.

The immense popularity of waxwork exhibits, like Mrs Salmon’s, whose shows included a booby-trapped mechanical figure of Old Mother Shipton and figures of notorious criminals, had a profound, but detrimental, effect on attitudes towards the Westminster effigies. By 1800, the currency of these effigies, once highly esteemed as the descendants of royal funeral effigies, had been severely devalued by its association in the public imagination with the low and vulgar (if popular) waxworks produced by the likes of Salmon




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and Tussaud, and critiques explicitly referred to the female practitioners of the art. Thus, although the status of wax modelling as a low and unskilled craft presented aspiring women with opportunities to enter the sculpting profession, the instrumental role these women played in expanding and popularising the art-form would marginalise them and prevent them from achieving the success and acclaim they deserved.

Conclusions Long with soft touch shall Damer’s chissel charm, With grace delight us, and with beauty warm; Foster’s fine form shall hearts unborn engage, And Melbourne’s smile enchant another age.41 The quotation that opens this essay and the above quotation from Erasmus Darwin’s Economy of Vegetation (1791) contain a contradiction in terms, as they combine the hard work of chiselling and the softness of Damer’s touch. This illustrates the unease over the rare but, in the eighteenth century, growing phenomenon of the woman sculptor. To resolve this contradiction, Darwin was forced to downplay the physicality of Damer’s carving work, preferring to present the artist as a modeller rather than a sculptor, able to breathe life and appropriately ‘feminine’ warmth into the cold, obstinate marble.42 But if the Michelangelesque construct of the sculptor impeded women’s access to this most masculine of art-forms, it did not exclude them entirely. Women could, as we have seen, exploit their longstanding association with wax modelling to gain a foothold in the profession; a remarkable number of eighteenth-century women were active in this field, developing this popular art-form in new and innovative ways. That women’s connection with these supposedly vulgar forms of popular entertainment prevented them from continuing their work in this field by the beginning of the nineteenth century should not obscure the valuable contribution these women made. While the careers of women including Roldán, Damer, Collot and Charpentier provide evidence that we should reject a too easy association of women with softness, the private and the intimate, it is also clear that many women such as Salmon, Wright, Tussaud, Andras and Goldsmith, were keen to exploit these connections to further their careers as women artists and reshape the sculpting world from within.

Notes 1 The Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, XVI (London, 1785): 494. With thanks to Jennie Batchelor. 2 Allan Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors, 5 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1854–6), III, p. 214.



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Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, sculptresses were mostly concentrated in Italy, Spain and what is now Belgium. These women include Maria Campo, Pellegrina Discalzi, Isabella Discalzi-Mazzoni, Properzia de’Rossi, Angelica Razzi, Damigella Ret(t)i, Mencia de la Oliva, Cecilia Sobrino-Morillas, Teresa del Nino, Anna de Coxie, Maria and Anna-Barbara Faydherbe. Tønnes Christian Bruun-Neergaard, ‘Extrait de la Revue philosophique, littéraire et politique sur un ouvrage de Mlle Julie Charpentier, artiste’, in annex to the Journal du dernier voyage du cen. Dolomieu dans les Alpes (Paris: Solvet Desenne-Surosne, 1802): ‘on m’a encore nommé plusieurs femmes françaises et étrangères, mais qui se sont seulement restreintes à modeler, n’osant jamais porter le ciseau sur le marbre dur, pour en créer une statue ou un bas-relief. . . . [J]e ne lus pas sans intérêt une annonce qui invite à voir un bas-relief exécuté en marbre, par une demoiselle’ (pp. 1–4). Reprinted in Le Petit Magasin des Dames (Paris: Delaunay, Debray, Delance, 1807), pp. 147–54. Roscoe E. Mullins, A Primer of Sculpture (London: Cassell and Co., 1889), p. 70. Several early sculptresses, including the Spanish sisters Andrea and Claudia Mena y Bitoria, Luisa Roldán, Sarah Gahagan and Maria Bell-Hamilton, received their technical training in the family environment or workshop. Some, however, had famous male teachers: Maria de Dominici, Marie-Anne Collot, Clémence-Sophie Daudignac, Teresa Benincampi, Elise Hüssener, Adelgunde Emilie Vogt and Angelica Facius were pupils of Gian-Lorenzo Bernini, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Joseph Chinard, Antonio Canova, Johann-Gottfried Schadow, Bertel Thorvaldsen and Christian-Daniel Rauch. Marie-Rose-Daguet Lechartier was a member of the French Academie de Saint-Luc in 1780 and Benincampi became a professor at the Art Academy in Florence around 1800. On this debate, see Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850–1900 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 101–41. Cunningham, pp. 219–20. See also pp. 234–5. Alison Kelly ‘Mrs. Coade’s Stone’, The Connoisseur (January 1978): 14–25. See also her monograph of the same title (1990). John Tavenor-Perry, ‘An Episode in the History of English Terra-cotta’, in The Architectural Review, xxxiii (June 1913): 120. The group is now in Horniman Gardens, London. Quoted in Catherine Hall-Van Den Elsen, ‘Louisa Roldán’, in Dictionary of Women Artists, ed. Delia Gaze, 2 vols. (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), p. 1194. The print, held by the British Museum Prints and Drawings, is reproduced in Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), p. 142. The print appeared before the Apollo statue was erected, which is explained, perhaps, by the fact that the engraver and architect, both named Holland, may have been related to one another. Anon., Authentic Account of the Fire which Reduced that Extensive Building of the Theatre-Royal, Drury Lane, To a Pile of Ruins, on the Evening of the 24th of February 1809 (London: W. Glendinning for T. Broom, 1809). According to other sources, the statue was only 10-foot high (perhaps without the pedestal). On the attribution of the statue to Damer, see Alison Yarrington, ‘The Female Pygmalion: Anne Seymour Damer, Allan Cunningham and the Writing of a Woman Sculptor’s Life’, The Sculpture Journal, 1 (1997): 32–44. The London Theatre Museum Archives contain several unpublished textual and visual sources (S.17-1984, FE58, FE59, and others) which prove the statue’s existence and its destruction by fire in 1809, but do not prove Damer’s authorship. Some contemporary engravings of Drury




14

15

16 17

18 19

20

21

Lane Theatre with a statue on top are reproduced in F. H. W. Sheppard, Survey of London: The Theatre Royal Drury Lane and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 35 (London, 1970). An inversion of this scene appears in Goya’s Pygmalion y Galathea (1820), in which a male sculptor aggressively hacks with his phallic chisel at the level of Galatea’s genitals, as if raping the anguished maiden. See John J. Ciofalo, ‘Unveiling Goya’s Rape of Galatea’, Art History, 18:4 (1995): 477–516; and Barbara Baert, ‘Een huid van ivoor. Het nachleben van Pygmalion’s geliefde in Ovidius “Metamorfosen”’, Bijdragen. International Journal in Philosophy and Theology, 2 (2002): 171–99. On the subject of women viewing the male sculpted nude, in particular the Apollo Belvedere, around 1800, see Anon. (signed Madame . . . témoin oculaire), ‘La Provençale devant l’Apollon du Belvédère, au Musée Napoléon’, Journal des dames et des modes, 26 (10 May 1807): 207–8. Heather Belnap Jensen, ‘The Journal des dames et des modes: Fashioning Women in the Arts, c. 1800–1815’, NineteenthCentury Art Worldwide, 5:1 (2006). In Henry Fuseli’s drawing [untitled – Woman before the Laocoön] (c. 1802, Zurich, Kunsthaus) the pose of the shocked girl in front of the nude Laocoön group is very comparable to that of the distressed girl in the Damerian Apollo print. Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for its Improvement (London: Joseph Johnson, 1798), p. 134. James Jackson Jarves, ‘Progress of American Sculpture in Europe’, The Art Journal, 10 (1871): 7; Anja Cherdron, Prometheus war nicht ihr Ahne. Berliner Bildhauerinnen der Weimarer Republik, Studien zur visuellen Kultur, 1 (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2000). The Poor Clares Convent in Turnhout, Belgium, for example. If anything, waxworks’ uncanny creation of the illusion of real presence put wax modelling even more at the limits of art. Julius von Schlosser, Histoire du portrait en cire, trans. Édouard Pommier (Paris: Macula, 1997). Denis Canguilhem, ‘Note de lecture – Julius von Schlosser, Histoire du Portrait en cire’, Etudes Photographiques, 4 (May 1998); Heather H. Martienssen, ‘Madame Tussaud and the Limits of Likeness’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 20:2 (1980): 128–34. Edward J. Pyke’s Dictionary of Wax Modellers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973) includes 32 women active as wax modellers between 1660 and 1830, as opposed to 466 men (plus 34 after 1830 and none before 1660). Thus according to Pyke’s study, women represented around 7 per cent of the total number of people working in the field. The percentage of male sculptors specialising in wax in the same period is unknown. Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker (Gesamtregister: Künstlerische Berufe, II, 3, München-Leipzig, 1997, pp. 2188–91) cite 22 female wax modellers active in this period. Reinhard Büll mentions only nine women modellers in Das große Buch vom Wachs (München: Verlag Georg D.W. Callwey, 1977), but explicitly remarks their ‘excellent’ and ‘joyful’ participation in this domain of the arts (p. 451). Walpole found Damer’s first sculpture – in wax – ‘clever, and much better than first attempts usually are’, but warned her that ‘it is much easier to model in wax than to carve in marble’ (Cunningham, 1856, pp. 215–16). In a letter to Damer’s father, Walpole wrote on 1 May 1763: ‘Good-night to . . . the infanta, whose progress in waxen statuary I hope advances so fast, that by next winter she may rival Rackstrow’s old man’. Mrs Paget Toynbee, Letters of Horace Walpole, 16 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904), V, p. 317. Benjamin Rackstrow (d. 1772) was known for his ‘Museum of anatomy and curiosities’ in Fleet Street, near Mrs Salmon’s Waxworks. Although both contained some duplicates, he liked to stress that he ran a museum and she just a waxworks. Wax portraits by Damer were in the Strawberry Hill sale of 1842.



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22 Georges Paston, Little Memoirs of the Eighteenth Century (E. P. Dutton and Co., 1901), [p. unknown]; as cited in Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), p. 35. In 1844 John and Horatio Mintorn, assisted by their sister, published for that purposes a pocketbook called Handbook for Modelling Flowers in Wax. Cf. Barbara Finney, ‘Victorian Pastimes: The Lost Art of Wax Flowers and Fruit’, in Nineteenth Century, 25(1) (Spring 2005): 24–8. 23 Quoted in Pyke, p. 126. 24 Quoted in Pyke, p. 52. 25 Quoted in Katlijne Van der Stighelen, Anna Maria Van Schurman (1607–1678) of ‘Hoe Hooge Dat Een Maeght Kan in de Konsten Stijgen (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 1987), p. 146. 26 See Mary Hillier, The History of Wax Dolls (Cumberland, MA: Hobby House Press, 1985), p. 18; Rebecca Messbarger, ‘Waxing Poetic: Anna Morandi Manzolini’s Anatomical Sculptures’, in Configurations, 9:1 (2001): 65–97. 27 Quoted in Pyke, p. 92. 28 One of the first recorded commercial displays of waxworks was in Amsterdam in the 1630s. See Didier Besnainou and Robert Wenley, ‘Wax’, in The Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 34 vols. (London: Macmillan Ltd. and Grove’s Dictionaries, 1996), XXXIII, p. 3. 29 Uta Kornmeier, ‘Kopierte Körper. “Waxworks” und “Panoptiken” vom 17. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert’, in Ebenbilder. Kopien von Körpern–Modelle des Menschen, ed. Jan Gerchow (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002), p. 119 (copper engraving (1793) by Thomas Smith of Mrs Salmon’s in Fleet Street, no. 189). 30 Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein, American Women Sculptors (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), p. 13. 31 Wright’s move to London ‘to make figures in wax’ was documented by Walpole. Letter to the Countess of Upper Ossory, 11 February 1775. See Walpole, VIII, p. 237. 32 Reproduced in Charles Coleman Sellers, Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), opposite p. 73. An anonymous portrait of Wright (Washington, DC, National Portrait Gallery, NPG.86.168) bears graphic testimony to that procedure. The sculptor Giuseppe Cerracchi portrayed Anne Damer too while modelling a small Genius of the Thames at the height of her lap, ‘cradling her own work in maternal fashion’ (Yarrington, p. 35). 33 Quoted in Sellers, p. 137. 34 In London, Mrs Sylvester (active 1780–94) displayed wax effigies of ‘the unfortunate Royal Family of France’. On Grosholtz-Tussaud, see Pauline Chapman, Madame Tussaud in England. Career Woman Extraordinary (London: Quiller Press, 1992); Claudine Mitchell, ‘Spectacular Fears and Popular Arts: A View from the Nineteenth Century’, in Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism, ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 159–81; Uta Kornmeier, ‘Denkmal in Wachs. “Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition” als Monument’, Kritische Berichte, 2:27 (1999): 40–54; Pamela Pilbeam, Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks (London and New York: Hambledon, 2003). 35 Hillier, p. 94; Alison Yarrington, ‘Under the Spell of Madame Tussaud: Aspects of “High” and “Low” in 19th-century Polychromed Sculpture’, in The Colour of Sculpture, ed. Andreas Blühm (Amsterdam and Leeds: Zwolle, 1996), p. 89. In The Volcano Lover (1992), Susan Sontag recounts the ‘Poses’ Lady Hamilton performed. 36 Richard Mortimer, ‘The History of the Collection’, in The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey, ed. Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer (Woodbridge: The Boydell




37 38

39

40 41

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Press, 1994), pp. 21–8; Maria Grazia Vaccari, ‘Wax’, in The Encyclopedia of Sculpture, ed. Antonia Boström (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), pp. 1748–52. Six of the ten remaining statues are by women. Quoted in Pyke, p. 55. Either she or her rival Mrs Salmon modelled the seated Queen Anne (1714–15) in Westminster Abbey, while Patience Wright created the effigy of her patron, William Pitt for the same collection. L. E. Tanner and J. L. Nevinson, ‘On Some Later Funeral Effigies in Westminster Abbey’, Archaeologica, 85 (1936): 169–202. John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and his times (London: Henry Colburn, 1949), pp. 184–5: ‘I sincerely hope . . . that a time will come, when Westminster Abbey, and all other buildings dedicated to sacred purposes, will be cleared of such mummery . . . , without being invited to pay for the exhibition of waxwork . . . To view the Abbey of Westminster, unencumbered of its waxen effigies, would be a gratification for many a morning’. The old Egyptian word ‘mum’ means ‘wax’. Early advertisements for Mme Tussaud’s learn that she also exhibited an Egyptian mummy. Smith, pp. 85–6. Erasmus Darwin, The Economy of Vegetation (London: J. Johnson, 1791), Canto II, ll. 111–12. The lines refer to Damer’s busts of Lady Elizabeth Foster and Lady Melbourne. Yarrington, ‘The Female Pygmalion’, p. 37.



102 Marjan Sterckx

A Female Sculptor and Connoisseur: Artistic Self-fashioning and the Exposure of Connoisseurship, Collecting and Concupiscence Angela Escott

Chiseling with the utmost swiftness Preface to The Works of Mrs. Cowley (1813)1 The Gazer grows enamoured, and the Stone As if exulting in its Conquest, smiles So turn’d each Limb, so swell’d with softening Art, That the deluded Eye the Marble doubts James Thomson, Liberty, a Poem, in Five Parts (1736), IV, ll. 181–42 Hannah Cowley’s final comedy, The Town Before You (1794), portrays as the principal woman protagonist a sculptor, almost certainly based on Anne Damer, who exhibited 32 works at the Royal Academy and contributed a self-portrait and a full-length marble of George III to the Uffizi Gallery. (The head of a boy prince (Prince Henryk Lubomirski) sculpted by Damer was reproduced in Germaine Greer’s The Boy (2003).) This essay examines the extent to which Cowley’s play is concerned with female artistic creativity and the association between connoisseurship and masculine virility. It suggests that The Town challenges the theory of a sexual division in creative power implied in the work of philosophers and members of the Society of Dilettanti, which associated men with creation and women with procreation, and argues that it questions a gendered view of aesthetics, reinforced by the related activities of collecting and connoisseurship. Cowley’s treatment of the female artist in The Town was foreshadowed by her earlier unpublished play, The World as it Goes; or a Party at Montpelier (1781), which also questions belittling views of women as appreciators or tasters of art. Cowley’s own conflict between her professional role as a dramatist and the requirement to fulfil 103



6

her domestic responsibilities, however, can be seen more clearly in her representation of the female artist in her final work, which she prefaces with a manifesto of her theory of comedy, and an explanation for her retirement from the theatre. Fraudulent connoisseurship and pretension to taste as a means to acquire genteel status are a recurring preoccupation in Cowley’s comedies. Equally, her works were concerned with women’s exclusion from the ‘republic of taste’ on the grounds that they lacked the ‘grand intellectual overview’, as well as the ‘grasp of art’s philosophical character’, which required a knowledge of philosophy, history, rhetoric, religion, and classical literature and languages.3 Women were considered to lack originality – they were taught the visual arts by copying prints, drawings and engravings – and, by implication, creativity and powers of reasoning.4 Hannah More accepted this belief and argued that ‘Both in composition and action [women] excel in details; but they do not so much generalise their ideas as men, nor do their minds seize a great subject with so large a grasp’.5 Cowley’s final comedy questioned such gendering of aesthetic and intellectual judgement in its treatment of the female sculptor, Lady Horatia Horton. There are parallels between Cowley’s self-presentation as Lady Horatia and Angelica Kauffmann’s self-portraits, in which Kauffmann appears ‘as a fully empowered, mentally alert, creative artist, with drawing pencil, paintbrush, or harp’, gazing ‘forthrightly at the viewer’.6 Another precedent can be found in Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677), in which the playwright makes reference to her own profession in the character of the prostitute Angelica Bianca. As Janet Todd suggests, women artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries often used such forms of visual and literary self-presentation as a way of negotiating the competing demands of their professional activities and society’s view of femininity.7 Lady Horatia functions in precisely this way as a representative female artist, through whom Cowley considers the nature of artistic production and the conflict between her professional and personal responsibilities. The Preface to Cowley’s Works makes clear her association of her own artistic practice with that of sculpting: She was always much pleased with the description of Michael Angelo making the marble fly around him, as he was chiselling with the utmost swiftness, that he might shape, however roughly, his whole design in unity with one clear conception.8 Cowley’s use of visual art to represent herself as a professional writer was significant, because women were more traditionally objects of, rather than agents in, artistic production, particularly in the medium of sculpture. If, as Ann Bermingham argues, a woman’s displays of her artistic accomplishments invited the male scopophilic gaze and ‘justified her exclusion from public life and from the connoisseur’s republic of taste’,9 then Cowley exploits the physical and visual medium of theatre to disrupt both this gaze and dominant conceptions of artistic production.10



104 Angela Escott

Early in the eighteenth century, connoisseurship, or the appreciation of art, framed in terms of the republican discourse of civic humanism, was bound up with a virtuous male heroism which renounced sexual gratification and qualified its possessor for citizenship in the political republic. John Barrell has charted how, later in the century, ‘the civic discourse on the visual arts found a way to accommodate under the cover of the aesthetic, an account of masculinity as virility which it had earlier been obliged to prohibit’.11 Connoisseurship was closely associated with collecting, an activity that was particularly the prerogative of wealthy men of the upper classes as it had been for centuries. In the late eighteenth century the emphasis of many collections had changed, from a miscellany of scientific objects, curiosities and books to items of purely artistic interest: paintings, sculpture, pottery and various objets d’art of historic interest brought back from the Grand Tour. Societies such as the Royal Academy, the Society of Dilettanti and the Society of Antiquaries were founded during the century to foster an interest in art and its collection. Connoisseurship and collecting were frequently associated with libertinism, as a large number of satirical prints testify. The works of Johann Zoffany, Richard Cosway and the caricaturists Thomas Patch and Thomas Rowlandson depict cultured gentlemen ‘admiring the naked charms of antique Venuses’.12 As Bermingham suggests, such works emphasise the commodity status of art and show the connoisseur confirming his masculinity, power and prestige through his aestheticising gaze.13 The Grand Tour – an important, though often unacknowledged aspect of which was the sexual education of young men14 – had a central place in the making of the connoisseur, as was recognised in the rules of election to the Society of Dilettanti. Women were implicated in this male world of collecting and connoisseurship as fetishised and aestheticised objects,15 as Hannah More pointed out when she criticised women for allowing themselves to be regarded in this way: ‘women are not mere portraits, their value not being determinable by a glance of the eye’.16 Emma Hart, first Sir William Hamilton’s mistress, then his wife, epitomises the fetishised, commodified object of male desire in the roles and poses she assumed for the pleasure of Hamilton and his guests. Horace Walpole observed that Sir William had actually married his Gallery of Statues and Rowlandson recorded in two satirical prints the sexual nature of Emma’s performances.17 Similarly, Maria Cosway, an artist friend of Cowley’s, was educated by her husband, the collector and artist Richard Cosway – ‘notorious dandy and rumoured to be a pimp and a pander’ – to be a hostess at grand parties, and to display her musical and artistic skills to distinguished guests in a way comparable with Emma Hamilton.18 Anthony Pasquin’s play The Royal Academicians (1786) lends credence to the idea that Maria was another of Richard’s art objects, to display to his wealthy and influential guests. Cowley’s portrayal of a female sculptor is a challenge to connoisseurship and theories of gender difference which denied female creativity. In copying



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the great sculptures of ancient Greece, her Lady Horatia Horton proves herself a practitioner of the liberal rather than mechanical arts by producing high art of the grand style, as did Damer. One reviewer of The Town Before You was mystified by Cowley’s heroine, perhaps because of her occupation: ‘Lady Horatia Horton is an original, so much so that we find it very difficult to reconcile the general tenour of her character with reason or probability.’19 The reviewer finds the character unusual because sculpture was an occupation little followed by women, who were more usually objects than producers of art in this medium; the intrepid defence of her occupation by Cowley’s heroine did not conform to current notions of femininity.

A female sculptor Comment of the time shows that the woman sculptor was a rare phenomenon, and contemporary sources describe Damer as ‘eccentric’. However, Walpole acknowledged her artistic skill, praising her bust of Sarah Siddons and comparing her dog sculptures with Bernini’s.20 She was the only woman sculptor, as Marjan Sterckx explains in her essay (chapter 5 above), to be included in Allan Cunningham’s Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors (1830) and was intellectually accomplished, although Walpole notes her anxiety not to display her ‘mental qualities’.21 She was a political activist and lampooned in the popular press; one satirical print depicts her ‘applying her chisel to the nude backside of an “Apollo” ’. These obscene prints are attributed by Andrew Elfenbein to Damer’s reputed lesbianism.22 Joshua Reynolds compared sculpture to the performing art of dancing, thus placing the emphasis on the human body.23 Reynolds’ passages on the representation of clothes on a sculptured body indicate that the sculptor was expected to reproduce as closely as possible the naked human body, and the German art historian J. J. Winckelmann maintained that ‘the Greek drapery, in order to help the Contour, was, for the most part, taken from thin and wet garments, which of course clasped the body, and discovered the shape’.24 The ideal for the male as well as the female sculptured body was to be smooth and effeminised: Burke used the terms ‘roundness’, ‘ease’ and ‘gracefulness’ to describe the Venus de Medici and the Antinous.25 And it was a sculpture, the Venus de Medici, that most induced the aesthetic gaze to become scopophilic and thereby posed a particular threat to civic virtue. The representation of the nude body was problematic for women at a time when women painters were excluded from full membership and the life class of the Royal Academy. They were thereby denied a proper education in the depiction of the naked human form. This had serious implications for female sculptors, as it did for female painters. The higher-status historical painting depended on the depiction of the human body, as in the biblical battle scenes, mythologies and allegories of active figures by seventeenth-century artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Nicolas Poussin and Guido Reni.26 Women



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also suffered marginalisation in published histories, and were being transformed into representations in a way that would become prevalent in the nineteenth century, as in the Zoffany group portrait where Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser are depicted as painted busts and objects of inspiration for the male artists.27 They were also less likely than men to make the Grand Tour, to see and study the painting and sculpture of Italy and Greece, although here Damer was an exception.28 The practical difficulties of sculpture were also discouraging to women, and potential patrons hesitated to entrust major commissions to them. A solution to some of these problems was to work in wax, as did Patience Wright.29 Lady Diana Beauclerk and Damer both produced models in wax, but Canova’s attitude to wax, and its association with popular entertainment, indicate that by working in this medium, women risked marginalisation as artists.30 Damer worked in a variety of media, including marble, terracotta, stone, ‘Greek marble’ and bronze, pursuing the ‘high’ style of sculpture with singlemindedness.31 By emphasising that her heroine sculpted in the ‘high’ style and used Greek models, Cowley was claiming membership of the ‘republic of taste’ for her woman artist. Of particular relevance to a female sculptor was Reynolds’ theory concerning the medium: that ‘imitation is the means, not the end, of art; it is employed by the sculptor as the language by which his ideas are presented to the mind of the spectator . . . towards faultless form and perfect beauty’. Imitation was not to be confused with copying or plagiarism, of which women were considered culpable, and which were associated with the inferior genres of still life, domestic portraiture and flower painting.32 Cowley’s Lady Horatia uses the term in its technical sense to describe her own work: ‘the strokes of the chissel, which presumed at distant imitation’ (V.2.80). Cowley makes reference to the restrictions on the female artist in a central scene of her final comedy. She negotiates the issue of nudity, like Kauffmann, by drawing attention to the clothing of her sculptor’s female model. Kauffmann ‘verged on prudery in her avoidance of nudity’, but she nevertheless used associations with erotic figures.33 Cowley also challenges the association of women’s creative power with procreation and men’s with the artistic originality of the Creator, in her character of a woman sculptor committed to her art. The research into primitive phallic rites at Isernia by William Hamilton and Richard Payne Knight, prominent aristocratic collectors and members of the Society of Dilettanti, and both renowned equally for their sexual exploits, confirmed to them that the origin of all religions was to be found in ancient phallic cults, and that religion and civilisation originated in the imposition of sexual difference.34

Satirising connoisseurs In the second half of the eighteenth century, the term connoisseur began to be used disparagingly of those who affected knowledge about art, and, like the




virtuoso, the connoisseur became the target of satire in poems, prints, pamphlets, the press and drama. Dr Johnson defined ‘connoisseur’ in his Dictionary as ‘a judge: a critick. It is often used of a pretended critick’, and the connoisseur described in a 1754 issue of the journal The Connoisseur is thoroughly disreputable. The article begins with the relation of a legal action taken by one Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries against another for robbery of ‘a pair of breeches of Oliver Cromwell’. Poems satirising connoisseurship, published in the second half of the century, emphasise collectors’ lack of discrimination and the unscientific ways in which authenticity is judged in the dating of medals, favourite collectors’ items. For Cowley, the exposure of the fraud and hypocrisy surrounding art criticism, and of the commodification of art, was part of her interest in anxiety about social mobility, revealed also in the exposure of pretension to education.35 She was not the first dramatist to satirise connoisseurs. Samuel Foote in his two-act comedy Taste (1752) and [ J ohn?] Conolly in his The Connoisseur or Every Man in his Folly (1736) exposed the fraud, ignorance and sham associated with the trade in art objects and claims to knowledge and taste in fine art. The dupes believe damage to an artefact – a crack or a missing nose – to be proof of age and authenticity. In The World, Cowley herself portrayed a woman connoisseur as the butt of her satire. Her ridicule is much gentler than William Hayley’s in his The Two Connoisseurs (1784), where Mrs Bijou is portrayed as unnatural because she has chosen to be a collector instead of having children. Hayley’s Mrs Bijou makes a bawdy remark about nipples in her words of anger directed at her clumsy servant, drawing attention to the licentiousness associated with connoisseurship: That awkward old Joan! An unmanerly minx Has knock’d off the nipple, my dear, from a Sphinx. (III.2.56) James Plumptre’s comic opera The Lakers (1798), the principal purpose of which is to lampoon a female botanist, shows the extent to which the female sculptor could be exploited for comic effect. While his elderly Miss Beccabunga Veronica is the butt of savage satire, her name itself being a botanical term for a water plant, Cowley’s sculptor is her play’s heroine, whose art provides material for the mildest of humour in comparison. Combining the skills of botanist, sculptor, Gothic novelist and landscape painter, Miss Beccabunga Veronica is portrayed as a sexually predatory bluestocking, ridiculed in particular for her use of Latin botanical terms all of which had sexual double-entendres. Plumptre’s Veronica is probably a satirical attack on Damer, and the reference to her breeches part in ‘theatricals’ may suggest her lesbianism. The scholarly and artistic roles given to women by women dramatists tend to be more sympathetic than those portrayed by male dramatists. Susan Centlivre’s Valeria, Cowley’s Lady Horatia and Joanna Baillie’s Latitia are three examples.36



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Cowley was preoccupied with spurious connoisseurship, taste and pretension to learning in several of her comedies. She first attacked pedantry and ostentatious display of learning in The Runaway, through her Précieuse ridicule after Molière, who extols the beauty treatments of Roman women. Lady Dinah is ridiculed for her inappropriate use of classical knowledge.37 In a dressingroom discussion about women concealing how they preserve their youth, she extols the beauty treatments of Roman women. However, Cowley received a classical education from her father, paid tribute to him in her poem The Maid of Aragon (1780), and made use of her knowledge in Who’s The Dupe (1779), where she drew attention to women’s exclusion from classical education.38 A musical pedant is depicted in Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783). His attempts to woo the shrewish Olivia are deflated when she declares a preference for the Jew’s harp in a satire which makes reference to attacks in print on Italian opera and mock musical imagery.39 Through these pretenders to taste or learning, Cowley critiques inappropriate use of knowledge and lack of self-knowledge. But the response she elicits from humorous attacks on these characters, mixed as it is with sympathy, suggests the more complex purpose of exposing them as society’s victims. More specifically, Cowley exposes the sexual hegemony and voyeurism associated with connoisseurship and collecting in the art world at the time. In an auction scene in The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), a country wife, already commodified in the description of her father, a virtuoso, who ‘kept her locked up with his Caterpillars and Shells’ (II.1.22), is being evaluated by a predatory seducer while the fraudulent dealer Mask boasts of his superficial knowledge of painting, employed to impress gullible potential purchasers. Cowley refers disparagingly in various plays to the Grand Tour, which played an important part in the making of a connoisseur, and was also regarded by many as ‘an education in venery and fornication’.40 The attempts to flatter Mrs Sparwell, the female connoisseur in The World, by using comparisons with the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, are undermined by the failure to achieve the required effect. And the erotic artefacts to be found in the collections of the connoisseurs are parodied in the Greek urinal which Mrs Sparwell failed to purchase at an auction, a fact she reveals after Fairfax’s attempts at romantic seduction. Cowley’s treatment of her female connoisseur is similar to Centlivre’s of her female virtuoso, Valeria, in The Bassett Table (1705). Both characters adopt practical attitudes to the natural world of animals and of human bodies. By making their characters break taboos in a blunt and unrefined manner, Cowley and Centlivre question conventional constructions of femininity. Mrs Sparwell’s matter-of-fact attitude to nudity is exposed later in The World, when she compares the human statue imitating the figure of Hercules with the original.41 Cowley here simultaneously constructs and subverts a negative image of the female traveller/connoisseur, stressing the technical issue and the gendered implication of the representation of cloth in sculpture. Mrs Sparwell’s attempt to undress the statue draws attention to the taboo against women




taking a critical interest in artistic representations of the naked human (male) body. Chloe Chard cites two examples, one also referring to Hercules, from the travel writer John Moore, which show how the art criticism of women travellers was marginalised or trivialised. Mrs Sparwell’s rejection of the brawny and masculine representation of Hercules, which exposes her pretentiousness and phoney knowledge, echoes John Wolcot’s (alias Peter Pindar’s) criticism of Angelica Kauffmann’s representations of effeminate men, although the criticism of Kauffmann is more salacious and thus more deliberately damaging to her reputation as a woman and as an artist. Cowley would have known Kauffmann through their mutual friend Maria Cosway, and would have been aware of attacks of this nature. I suggest that under the guise of a satirical assault on a woman connoisseur, Cowley makes a counterattack against this kind of sexual slur, and thereby exposes the marginalisation of women artists.

Cowley’s female sculptor The sculptor Lady Horatia Horton is involved with the principal plot of The Town, which deals with a wealthy merchant’s testing of his nephew’s integrity, and with the clash between his philistinism and Lady Horatia’s artistic interests. Lady Horatia represents Cowley’s vision of a woman artist at her time, practising her art in the face of prejudices and obstacles. That Horatia is the principal female protagonist is suggested by Cowley’s allocation of the part to the actress Mrs Pope, formerly Elizabeth Younge, who played several of Cowley’s most resourceful heroines. Cowley also links her sculptor with the association of connoisseurship and masculine voyeurism and libertinism from her first appearance. The first description of Lady Horatia, whose name is introduced in a conversation between Conway and Asgill about their respective lovers, ironically objectifies her as an accomplished and beautiful object on display, in the same way as Kaufmann and Moser are objectified in Zoffany’s The Academicians. Conway: I think it must be charming to see a fine woman sit with a chissel, and bring out of a block of marble, a form as graceful as her own[.] (I.4.16–17) Because of the prohibition on women representing the naked male body, Lady Horatia is depicted as a virtuous and patriotic woman with a taste for the art of the ancients, sculpting only modest British women or ancient Greek matrons. She even has a role in reproving the morally dubious aspects of sculpture: Asgill: the purity of my Horatia chastises the art she loves. The subjects she selects, Delicacy itself would paint out: with an enchanting modesty she seeks for models only in the graces of her own sex, the daughters of Britain, and the matrons of Greece. (I.4.17)



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However, despite Asgill’s words, Lady Horatia later claims three Greek figures as her work, of which Atalanta is a huntress wooed by Hippomenes and tempted by his apples, and another is Ganymede, a young male carried off by Zeus on account of his beauty. Neither of these fits into Asgill’s categories of ‘Daughters of Britain’ or ‘matrons of Greece’. The setting for Lady Horatia’s first entry is ‘a large elegant Apartment, with various Pieces of Sculpture, Statues, Urns, etc.’ (II.3.29). The art is introduced before the artist, as a companion ‘walks down from the top, viewing the statues’. She praises them, informing us of Lady Horatia’s devotion to her art, but also linking the sculptor as beautiful object with her own works. Previous critical analyses of the play assume that sculpture is of secondary importance to Lady Horatia, and that she gives it up upon marriage. This essay suggests, however, that Horatia represents the female artist dedicated to her art, if not dependent on it for a living, as was Cowley. The commitment shown by Lady Horatia to her art suggests she will continue to practise sculpting within a fulfilled marriage, despite Sir Simon’s concluding challenge. Sir Simon: Come, come, Madam, throw away your chisel and your marble blocks, and set about making a good wife. That ART is the noblest pride of an Englishwoman. (V.7.102) The manuscript version undermines Sir Simon’s credibility by the inclusion of an additional sentence which confirms his philistinism: Lady Horatia: He thinks there is nothing dignified in sculpture; he hears, without veneration, the names of Phidias, and Michael Angelo. Sir Simon: To be sure I do. I care no more for them than I do for the man who made the Queen without a nose in St. Paul’s Church Yard – Come, Madam, throw away your chisel. (V.7.102) This was the passage that provoked one critic to write of ‘a species of low farcical language, calculated more, to excite disgust than entertainment’.42 The passage was removed by the time the first edition of the play was published, a removal which allows Sir Simon to appear more sympathetic. Sir Simon further undermines his position by his disrespectful outburst against books and classical culture, following Horatia’s departure with frustrated ‘dignity’.43 Sir Simon: Here’s a woman comes on pretence to speak about my nephew, and then begins some gibberish about sculpture . . . and talks of Ganymede, and Atalanta, and Olympus, and such vile trash as lads learn out of Ovid; books, that if I was a member of parliament, I’d bring in a bill to make it felony for any bookseller to vend. (V.2.81)




Lady Horatia’s passionate defence of her art in this scene is juxtaposed with Sir Simon’s philistine abuse of her work and of significant works of classical literature. Cowley further exploits the comic device of mistaken identity as an opportunity for confrontational abuse. The modesty Lady Horatia first assumes is forgotten when Sir Simon insults her art. He speaks of Medusa as ‘women’s faces with young serpents hanging in drop curls, by way of a new fashion’d tete’. She speaks ‘in great warmth’ of Medusa as being ‘amongst the wonders of art’. The commitment of Cowley’s female protagonist to her work is arguably more persuasive than the cynicism and ignorance of Sir Simon and the patronising detachment of his servant, Perkins.44 Only emotional loss affects this commitment, and the moment when Horatia admits that she has not worked for a week, since Asgill stopped his visits: ‘I have no joy left – the chissel drops from my hand’ is a poignant reminder of Cowley’s own situation as a professional artist who had to continue writing comedy while her husband was in India. Lady Horatia seeks satisfaction in her artistic life above the trivialities of bon ton society and a life devoted to self-display. She itemises the exhaustions of a fashionable life: After hours wasted, murder’d, in the hard work of the toilette, away she springs! Her wheels thunder rapidly through the streets – she flies from assembly to assembly. Does the music of the concert fascinate her? No. Some other beauty has been the belle of the evening; her heart has been torn with envy . . . (II.3.30) Centlivre had similarly contrasted the intellectual life of Valeria with the dissolute Lady Reveller’s fashionable pursuit of gambling in The Bassett Table. Cowley disrupts the male gaze of the connoisseur in the statue scene in The Town, which is a reworking of the similar scene in The World. Now the connoisseur is male, Tippy, whose boast of expertise in the female form is exposed as an imposture when he dismisses Georgina’s simulated statue as ‘ill proportioned’, ‘a mere wax doll’; and insists ‘a human figure made on this principle, could never move’. The figure proves to be a live young woman, playing a joke on her lover. The excess of Conway’s admiration is deflated by Tippy’s prosaic criticism of the sculptor’s technique. With the light touch of humour eschewed by More five years later in dealing with the same subject in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), Cowley hints at a number of issues involving woman as spectacle with her stage direction: HUMPHREY enters with the dress, and shews marks of awkward wonder. (II.3.32)45



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The servant’s embarrassment at carrying the dress Georgina has brought to model as Andromache draws attention to the critical concern with the naked sculptured body; to the related moral outrage at new fashions influenced by classical dress, which emphasised the shape of the female body; to the associations between connoisseurship and concupiscence and also to the proscription against women painting nude models. Humphrey’s embarrassment is deflected by Georgina’s irreverent comparison of Andromache’s mourning for Hector, as depicted in a famous sculpture, with her own sadness at the loss of her pet canary. An attack on the Royal Academy, its president, the upwardly mobile merchant classes and their pretension to taste by the misanthropic and aptly named connoisseur Acid, and cut from the manuscript, is arguably an ironic exposure of the marginalisation of the merchant and lower classes in the matter of taste.46 But it also shows Cowley assuming authority to comment on a new national institution, a ‘public space of . . . ferocious contention’, an institution on which satirical attacks were being made by radical writers, identified with the court, and also one which marginalised women artists in subtle ways, such as by not allowing their attendance at life classes, which was an obstacle to their producing art of the highest status, history paintings.47 And through her representation of a female sculptor whose artistic activity is in a ‘high’ genre which dealt in Platonic ideals and promoted public virtue, Cowley had staked a claim for herself as a creative artist in the ‘republic of taste’.

Notes 1 Hannah Cowley, The Works of Mrs. Cowley: Dramas and Poems, 3 vols. (London: Wilkie and Robinson, 1813), I, p. xv. 2 Quoted in John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1992), p. 85. 3 John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995) pp. 66, 68; Ann Bermingham, ‘Elegant Females and Gentlemen Connoisseurs’, in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 504. 4 Bermingham, p. 505. 5 Hannah More, The Works of Hannah More, 6 vols. (London: Fisher & Jackson, 1834), III, p. 202. 6 Anne K. Mellor, ‘British Romanticism, Gender and Three Women Artists’, in The Consumption of Culture 1600–1800, p. 130. 7 Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660–1800 (London: Virago Press, 1989), p. 9 8 Preface to Cowley’s Works, p. xv. The author of the Preface is unknown. 9 Bermingham, p. 505. 10 Paula Backscheider applies the theory of the male gaze to eighteenth-century theatre when she illustrates how prints of Sarah Siddons in performance show her resisting




11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28

objectification by returning the viewer’s gaze and adopting masculine facial expressions and poses. Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 214. Ellen Donkin, too, describes an occasion when Siddons stepped out of her role and shifted the power in the relationship with her volatile audience by directing her gaze at them, challenging her opponents and commanding their support. ‘Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger: Feminist Historiography for Eighteenth-Century British Theater’, in Critical Theory and Performance, ed. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 284–6. Barrell, The Birth of Pandora, p. 71. Wendy Wassyng Rowarth, ‘Anatomy is Destiny: Angelica Kaufmann’, in Femininity and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture, ed. Gill Perry and Michael Rossington (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 50–1. Bermingham, p. 508. John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), pp. 257, 261. Brewer, pp. 262, 263. More, III, p. 279. Brewer, pp. 267–9. Wassyng Roworth, p. 51. It is known that Cowley was of Maria Cosway’s circle, because of a letter of introduction to Thomas Jefferson, another from Cowley expressing sympathy for Maria’s ill health, and Boswell’s mention of meeting Cowley at one of the Cosways’ Sunday evening soirées. Richard Cosway came from Tiverton, Cowley’s home town. Gerald Barnett, Richard and Maria Cosway: A Biography (Cambridge: Westcountry Books and the Lutterworth Press, 1995), pp. 107, 80, 70, 15, 16. Unattributed review of the first production of The Town in a newspaper cutting. Theatre Museum G.E. 3131. Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, with some Account of the Principal Artists, ed. Ralph N. Wornum, 4 vols. (New York: Arno Press, 1969), I, pp. xx, xxi. Walpole, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. Humphrey Milford, 48 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; and London: Oxford University Press, 1937–83), XII, p. 107. Walpole, Correspondence, XXV, pp. 183, 184. William Holland, The Damian Apollo (1789); W. Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990), pp. 141–2; Wassyng Rowarth, p. 59; Andrew Elfenbein, ‘Lesbian Aestheticism on the Eighteenth-Century Stage’, EighteenthCentury Life, 25 (2001), p. 2. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark ( New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 181. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, ‘On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks’ (1755) and ‘Essay on the Beautiful in Art’ (1763), in Winckelmann: Writings on Art, ed. David Irwin (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 61–85; pp. 95, 71. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 109. Wassyng Roworth, p. 42. The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771–2). Chadwick, p. 7. Women of the genteel and upper social classes like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, toured Britain, visiting the lakes and the country houses, while men undertook the Grand Tour of Europe. Elizabeth Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) p. 17.



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29 Robert D. Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 54. 30 Wax models had associations with popular entertainments for the lower classes, with Rackstraw’s ‘Museum of Anatomy and Curiosities’ or Mrs Salmon, who exhibited at Southwark Fair (Altick, pp. 3, 52, 54). Canova snubbed an admirer by telling him he had no intention of producing wax works. Hugh Honour, NeoClassicism (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 118. 31 Yarrington, pp. 430, 31. 32 Wassyng Roworth, pp. 41–2. 33 Wassyng Roworth, p. 51. 34 Bermingham, p. 506; Payne Knight wrote An Account of the Worship of Priapus, published by the Society of Dilettanti. (Brewer, p. 266). 35 See, for example, Cowley’s Who’s the Dupe (1779). 36 Susanna Centlivre, The Bassett Table (1705); Joanna Baillie, The Match (1836). 37 Cowley wrote in her accompanying letter to Garrick, ‘I meant her to be pedantic, haughty and resentful’. Letter to David Garrick, [Saturday, 18 June 1776], National Art Library, V&A, Forster Collection, F.48.E.20, Add. 26, no. 29. 38 Accept, dear parent, from a filial pen, The humble offspring of my pensive muse; She painted on my mind a daughter’s woes, Nor could my heart the tender theme refuse. Reproduced in The Lady’s Magazine, 11 (May 1780), p. 234. 39 Jeremy Barlow, ‘The Saltbox and Bladder-and-String in Eighteenth-Century Burlesque Music’. Unpublished conference paper for ‘Music in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Institute of Historical Research, London, 29 November 2002. 40 Brewer, p. 261. 41 The statue coming to life was a device used for tragi-comic purposes in the plays and opera based on Tirso de Molina’s character Don Juan (in El Burlador de Sevilla [1630]) in turn by Molière, Goldoni and Mozart with Da Ponte. The dramatic device is employed by Cowley in a farcical way to ridicule the pretentious and voyeuristic aspects of connoisseurship. 42 Theatre Museum G.E. 3131. 43 Cowley was the daughter of a bookseller, and in a dedication of her poetry offers a tribute to her father for the education he gave her. See above. 44 ‘Perkins: Dear Sir, any taste is better than no taste, and a lady who employs her thoughts and her chissel on works of art, is, at least, not idle; and therefore, as Doctor Johnson says, not in the way of being wicked’ (V.2.83). 45 More censures ‘the impure style of dress, and that indelicate statue-like exhibition of the female figure, which by its . . . seemingly wet and adhesive drapery, so defines the form as to prevent covering itself from becoming a veil’. She denounces ‘this licentious mode . . . observed on the dances of the Spartan virgins’ (More, III, p. 59). 46 Acid complains of the way the Royal Academy has treated him in a passage cut from the manuscript, and he mentions topical poems by John Wolcot, alias Peter Pindar, which satirise members of the Royal Academy. 47 Mark Hallett, ‘ “The Business of Criticism”: The Press and the Royal Academy Exhibition in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Art on the Line: the Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836, ed. David Solkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 65–75, 73–4; Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From the Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), p. 37.








Part III The Material Culture of Empire





‘The Taste for Bringing the Outside in’: Nationalism, Gender and Landscape Wallpaper (1700–1825) Ellen Kennedy Johnson

Panoramic landscape wallpapers were introduced into domestic interior spaces as one of many markers of taste, a concept used to legitimate social distinctions important to class differentiation in England during the eighteenth century. According to Pierre Bourdieu, taste confers on the individual a cultural competence necessary to developing myriad distinctions of class strata in any given society.1 An investigation of the decorative arts of the period in general, and wallpaper specifically in this essay, helps to illuminate the subtle differences distinguishing these multiple social divisions. Landscape wallpapers imported from China, those made by the French and English in imitation of them, called chinoiserie papers, and the formidable scenic panoramas depicting colonial encounters, the gloriousness of the English countryside, mythological stories and classical antiquities designed and sold throughout the eighteenth century all served as visual representations of the British grammar of empire. Decorating the home with objects such as wallpaper telegraphed one’s political, economic and social status to the world; visual culture participated in a range of nationalist discourses: celebrating mercantile ventures in the Far East as well as the English landscape and British exploration of South America, the Pacific and the South Sea Islands. Furthermore, wallpaper domesticated the exotic and made the world Britain’s to consume visually. This essay traces the social life of landscape wallpaper in England through the long eighteenth century, teasing out the social and cultural values intrinsic to its visual display. It will illustrate how the move from the embrace of imported Chinese wallpaper at the beginning of the century, to the chinoiserie imitations at mid-century, and then the panoramic scenic landscapes at the end of the century represents more than a commonplace shift in aesthetic sensibilities or desire for emulation. Indeed, it signifies as a visual declaration of the role Britain’s emergent nationalist discourses – exploration, appropriation and empire – had in shaping the interiors of both middle- and upper-class homes. *** 119



7

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[Chintz] crept into our houses, our closets, our bedchambers, curtains, cushions, chairs, and at last the beds themselves, were nothing but calicoes and Indian stuffs, and in short everything that used to be made of wool or silk, relating to dress of the woman or the furniture of our house, was supplied by the Indian trade.2 Throughout the eighteenth century, the British East India Company maintained a showroom in London, exhibiting exotic wares brought back from Asia. Among the most sought-after products were spectacular hand-painted wallpaper panels from China. When authentic decorative imports from China first appeared, they were embraced not only for their beauty and uniqueness but as symbols of the pairing of two highly civilised cultures. As Zhang Longxi writes, ‘sublimated in the delicate tints of fragile porcelain, in the vaporous hues of shimmering Chinese silks, there revealed itself to the minds of the gracious eighteenthcentury society in Europe a vision of happy living their own optimism had already dreamed of’.3 China served as a model for art, law, learning, spirituality and philosophy for the English, who were ‘weary of the copy-book picture of Ancient Rome ruled solely by gravitas and decorum’.4 As a fledgling commercial power, England embraced the sophisticated industriousness of the Chinese as well as the bearing of ‘Confucius’ morals to Britannia’s ears’.5 When Chinese landscape wallpapers arrived on English soil at the turn of the eighteenth century, they became a highly desirable commodity, and their design and use provided contemporary material cultural theorists with rich information about their cultural significance beyond their use-value. Most art historians surmise that the European desire to acquire Chinese wallpapers was fuelled by an interest in the Far East as a place of mystery, since travel there was prohibited to most Europeans throughout the eighteenth century. Joanne Kosudu-Warner, curator of the Cooper Hewitt Design and Textile Museum in New York City, theorises that the draw of Europeans to the brightly coloured and detailed designs of Chinese wallpaper stems from their imagining ‘an exotic land of silks, porcelain, jades, and tea, where peonies grew to perfection and pagodas stood on every corner’.6 While curiosity about unfamiliar places was common in this period, as the burgeoning travel industry in England and the Continent sparked a great interest in lands near and far, Kosudu-Warner’s explanation elides other important factors driving the market for these expensive wallpapers. In historical and curatorial accounts of wallpaper, there is generally no distinction made between the Chinese papers created in Asia and those produced in imitation of them in Europe.



The British East India Company made its first voyage to China in 1703 and in the next hundred years items imported from the Far East, such as fabric, furniture and tableware, once considered rarities, became commonplace objects in the home. In 1708, Daniel Defoe wrote about the phenomenon:

The problem lies in how many art historians conflate the two distinct branches of Chinese wallpaper production: those made in China c. 1700–50 and the copies produced in France and England c. 1750–1800. This distinction is important because it was during this time of expansive trade with the Far East that many cultural critics claim the British solidified their notion of what constituted both eastern and western identity. In Orientalism, Edward Said asserts that the creation of the discourse of the Other was a purposeful construction of the ‘Orient’ as a mysterious and unknowable region. Its inhabitants were portrayed as peaceful and hardworking, but childlike in mind, stemming from ritualistic and systematic behaviours performed to create a sense of uniformity, demanded by the acquiescence to despotic dynastic rule that arrested individual mental development. Orientalist discourse portrayed this lack of intellectual growth as the opposite of the risktaking, optimistic and inventive nature of the European psyche, necessitating their economic, political, military and spiritual intervention for the benefit and advancement of primitive or stagnant cultures. It was under this rubric of Orientalism that the wallpapers imported from China and sold at exorbitant prices began to be displayed in homes of wealthy landowners and merchants. Authentic Chinese wallpaper panels consisted of hand-painted scenes of everyday life wrought in luminous colours and executed using exacting details of nature (Figure 23). The stunning detail and luminous colours used in Chinese wallpapers were like nothing seen in Europe and were a revitalising enhancement over the sombre colour schemes of Renaissance interiors. And while porcelain, lacquered cabinets and other imported goods from China captivated the European consumer, none of these could compare to the dramatic artistic display of an entire room of non-repeating, hand-painted landscape wallpaper panels. Popular themes seen in Chinese wallpapers included women and men working the land in industrial and agricultural pursuits, planting tea, harvesting rice, throwing pots and dying silk, luscious mountain landscapes, hunting scenes, and detailed drawings of insects, flowers and trees. The bird, flower and tree of life motifs were popular themes found in Chinese landscape wallpaper and the inspiration for these designs probably were borrowed from the India chintz fabrics imported to England from the middle of the seventeenth century.7 Sir Joseph Banks, an eighteenth-century English botanist, praised the Chinese wallpapers for their ‘botanical exactness’, and Jean Hamilton, former curator of the Victoria and Albert museum in London, compares the Chinese artists’ fidelity in painting vegetation and plant life to ‘the illustrations of scientific works’.8 And yet, although the landscape wallpaper genre shared similar themes, it was rare to find two patterns alike, making each purchase distinctive. The demand for Chinese imported wallpaper grew precipitously in the first half of the eighteenth century and far exceeded the supply. Routinely, buyers waited for up to eighteen months for their orders to arrive and paid



Nationalism, Gender and Landscape Wallpaper 121

Figure 23 Chinese hand-painted wallpaper (1775–85) used at Beaufort, Gloucester, MA. Courtesy of the Society for the Preservative of New England Antiquities.

seven to ten times more than they did for the traditional English-produced flock paper used in most homes at the time.9 These wallpapers were well suited to the emerging needs of the eighteenth-century English home. Whereas in previous centuries decorative objects were purchased only by the wealthy, the burgeoning merchant class in England now had the disposable income and contacts via trade endeavours to acquire luxury goods for their urban and suburban homes. In contrast to the authentic Chinese papers, chinoiserie wallpapers were produced by French and English manufacturers in response to a great demand for similar, but affordable versions of the Chinese masterworks. A great majority of the designs created by the Chinese were copied and sold as chinoiserie: a decorative style connoting an aesthetic engagement with Chinese-inspired designs. Although chinoiserie was recognised as a decorative style as early as the seventeenth century, the popularity of China works, such as silk, porcelain, furniture, silverware, lacquering and wallpaper grew steadily and reached its peak in the second half of the eighteenth century.10 Chinoiserie imitations of authentic Chinese wallpapers proved to be a valuable commodity to the growing middle class. One panel of authentic Chinese wallpaper purchased in the 1760s cost 63s on average, while the price of English flocked wallpaper cost 9 shillings a roll.11 In 1749, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote to her daughter




that she ‘had heard of the fame of the [Chinese] paper hangings and had some thought of sending for a suite, but was informed that they were as dear as damask, which put an end to [her] curiosity’. Yet her friend Lady Hereford found French chinoiserie papers in London sold for ‘twelve and thirteen shilling a yard, and others at four shillings, and having finally bought one at eleven pence’.12 The creation of chinoiserie wallpaper copies by British and French manufacturers was important for two reasons: it allowed the middling classes to decorate their homes in the style of the upper gentry, while also funnelling profits away from the foreign market into the home-grown textile industry. However, in the process of imitation, the essence of the art was adulterated. European manufacturers often misunderstood the symbols and iconography of the Chinese designs. Other producers reworked the designs in an effort to improve on existing models and invent a more European version of the genre. French artists such as Jean-Antoine Watteau, Françoise Boucher and JeanBaptiste Pillement imitated the genre in their paintings by combining elements of both rocaille (rococo) and chinoiserie, featuring Chinese figures, exotic animals and colourful pavilions in French pastoral settings. Watteau, Boucher and Pillement energised the fashion for chinoiserie, adapting Chinese designs and producing numerous whimsical paintings combining elements of Chinese and European perspectives, which became extremely popular in both English and French circles, such as Boucher’s ‘Scenes of Chinese Life’ and Pillement’s ‘The Collection of Chinese Tents’. Perhaps, in reaction to the restraints of neo-Palladian design in the first half of the century, the frivolity of chinoiserie, with its images of parasols and pigtailed Mandarins, reached a fevered pitch in mid-century, evident in its ubiquitous presence in all aspects of the decorative arts throughout England. Phyllis Ackerman classifies these English and French imitations as ‘frivolous parody creating a world of diminutive Chinese such as never existed before in any land, garbing them in foolish, amusing distortions of true Chinese costumes’.13 These playful scenarios did not invoke serious thought or contemplation, like the authentic Chinese designs, which celebrated the landscape and the people who worked on it. The distinction made between the Chinese and European branches of the genre is important to the study of landscape wallpapers because it links the European commercial chinoiserie fabrications to the construction of the Other as important to the development of middle-class sensibilities. The wall coverings designed, hand-painted and imported from the East rarely portrayed its subjects in the manner that would agree with the European Orientalist fantasies. By the early nineteenth century, representations of Asia were devoid of any understanding of the Chinese culture and its people, and what was once in a vehicle for meditation and contemplation of the land became an object of decoration and a sign of status and taste. Therefore, European variations of the landscape wallpaper genre offering patronising and degraded illustrations of Asian life cannot be seen solely as an





[T]he discussion of any landscape presents a selective point of view. One must judge whether to place the decisions of the powerful or the resistance of the powerless at the center of one’s values; one must judge whether to overlook sinister shadows or suggest why they are there. Not just descriptions of landscapes but landscapes themselves are inherently sociological judgments, for they implicate the viewer as well as the view. Landscapes, moreover, have the advantage of making visible what most economic discussions lack. They enable us to see quite literally what is lost and what is gained.15 Zukin’s theory about the appropriation of the landscape to further the power of the dominant class becomes important to the analysis of the landscapes depicted in both the Chinese and European versions of the panoramic wallpaper genre. Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the English wallpaper industry, already producing superior quality flock, chintz and floral papers for over a century, suffered a setback after the introduction of the imported landscape papers from Asia. English wallpaper manufacturers rose to the occasion by creating their own versions of Oriental landscapes, but the brilliant colours and the realistic representations of nature in the authentic handpainted copies could not be reproduced at a marketable cost. Therefore, wallpaper entrepreneurs needed to invent a product similar to the coveted Chinese papers without the exorbitant production costs associated with hand-painted originals. Woodblock printing was resurrected, a technique used for hundreds of years, allowing manufacturers to produce several copies of a single design, mitigating the costs associated with construction. Still, the process was labour-intensive and required a skilled artisan to apply the colours. This technique, then, bridged the gap between the artistry of the hand-painted papers and the inexpensive, low-quality, machine-printed striped and floral wallpapers. Prices for these chinoiserie papers were steep, but less expensive than the originals, allowing the middle class to afford them. Having solved the problem of cost, manufacturers had to promote an intrinsic value for buying the imitation papers so the social importance was consistent with those of the upper class. Without the ability to create the stunning detail of the authentic Chinese papers, manufacturers often promoted their papers as more tasteful representations of the originals. In 1754, John Baptist Jackson published An Essay on the Invention of Engraving and Printing in Chiaroscuro . . . and the Application of it to the Making of Paper



innocent curiosity about the mystery of foreign lands as Kosudu-Warner and others suggests. The sociologist Sharon Zukin theorises about the way societies use landscapes as ‘symbolic representation[s] [of] material and social practices’.14 Zukin insists that we read landscapes in the same way as we read a painting or a photograph, as a mapping of cultural values:


It need not be mentioned to any Person of the least Taste, how much this Way of finishing Paper [using the woodblock technique] exceeds every other hitherto known; ‘tis true, however, that the gay glaring Colours in broad Patches of red, green, yellow, blue, etc., which are to pass for Flowers and other Objects, which delight the Eye that has no true Judgment belonging to it, are to be found in the Common Paper; but Colours softening into one another, with Harmony and Repose, and true Imitations of Nature in Drawings and Design. Nor are there Lions leaping from Bough to Bough, like Cats, Houses in the Air, Clouds and Sky upon the Ground, a thorough Confusion of all the Elements, nor Men and Women, with every other Animal, turn’d Monsters, like the figures in Chinese paper, ever to be seen in this studio.16 Again, it is not clear whether Jackson, too, was conflating authentic Chinese wallpaper and the imitation papers because the caricatured images he speaks of were not a feature of the imported Chinese papers but instead, represented the ersatz versions produced by the English and the French. J. B. Reveillon’s Chinoiserie Depicting Shepherdess and Aerial Combat is a French paper designed in the style Jackson derides (Figure 24). The unrealistic scene, which represents a shepherdess tending her flock while Chinese warriors simultaneously conduct a battle, presents a light-hearted, mischievous and playful illustration of Asian culture typical of the images fashioned on numerous chinoiserie decorative objects popular throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as teapots, cups, plates, serving trays, fabric and folding screens. Jackson’s misrepresentation may have simply been a tactic to disparage authentic Chinese wallpapers in favour of his own. However, another explanation for this confusion may be that many of the imitation chinoiserie papers were often inspired by diaries written by merchants working for the British East India Company and travel books written by scholars and scientists containing detailed engravings of buildings, rivers and other landmarks in China, India and Japan. Atlas Chinensis and Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, both written at the end of the seventeenth century, were used in the mid-eighteenth century by the two most influential designers of scenic wallpaper, the French artist Jean Baptiste Pillement and the English artist John Baptist Jackson. The authors of Atlas Chinensis claimed to have more exacting geographical descriptions than a previous edition of China’s fifteen provinces ‘collected out of their several writings and journals by Arnoldus Montanus; English’d and adorn’d with above a hundred several sculptures by John Ogilby’.17 John Stalker and George Parker’s Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, published in 1688, while primarily a book about how Chinese designs could be adapted to European tastes and talents, provided over 100



Hangings of Taste, Distinction, and Elegance, extolling the virtues of the English papers over the Chinese:

Figure 24 Jean-Baptiste de Réveillon, sidewall block printed on handmade paper, Paris c. 1785. Courtesy of Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

illustrations of painted Chinese lacquered furniture, including detailed images of long-necked birds, pagodas, icicles, dragons, mountains, blossoms and other images we have come to associate with Asian design.18 Because the English, French and Dutch wrote most of these sourcebooks, one must take into account that their interpretations of landscapes and other images may have been clouded by Orientalist notions of Asian culture. In the introduction to his anthology of English travel and colonial writing, Andrew Hadfield confirms Said’s assertion about the construction of the Oriental ‘Other’. In reading numerous narratives written about Indians, Japanese and Chinese, Hadfield concludes that principally they are described by writers as ‘barbaric peoples . . . not savage and uncivilised like the Irish, most Native Americans, or the South-Sea Islanders, but cruel, pagan, and frightened of change, a pointed and constructive contrast to the enlightened Christian and dynamic West’.19 Perhaps more importantly though, Jackson’s assertion about the superlative quality and design of French chinoiserie wallpapers over the authentic




Chinese designs signalled a growing Eurocentric and, more specifically, English nationalist narrative developing during the second half of the eighteenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the respect the English once felt for Chinese culture was eclipsed by narratives of England’s growing superiority, and the vogue for authentic, Chinese-inspired designs was overshadowed by the sale of home-grown imitation chinoiserie designs. This diminishing interest coincided with the rise of the British textile industry and a growing distrust of foreign influences upon the culture. By first appropriating and then altering the character of Chinese landscape wallpapers, the lesser gentry and wealthy farmers, whether residing in the city or the country, were able to decorate their homes in the style that was once reserved for the aristocracy, without the exorbitant price tag. In this way they registered their solidarity with the ruling class by approving of the representations of the Oriental Other, which served as the ‘mapping of cultural values’ Zukin describes and represents one of many factors allowing England to expand domestic textile manufacturing and comfortably continue their lucrative endeavours in the Far East. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, concern about the financial power of the growing middle class contributed to the social anxieties of the ‘powers that be’, and the expansion of shops and goods for sale, such as chinoiserie papers, represents one factor contributing to their fear of displacement by aspiring social climbers. Susan Staves discusses the ‘anxiety that people were crossing class barriers was frequently expressed and such developments as that of resorts like Bath and Tunbridge no doubt made it easier for “imposters” to make their way than it had in earlier times’.20 In her novel The Absentee, Maria Edgeworth illustrates the tension between the social elite and the social aspirant, showing how knowledge of the way decorative objects are used and moved through the social setting is often the determinant of one’s acceptance or rejection. In the opening chapters of the novel, Lady Clonbrony busily chooses exotic ‘Chinaworks’ to display at her gala in which she hopes many of the London ton will attend. Although she is the wife of an Irish absentee, Lady Clonbrony claims England as her place of birth and seeks acceptance in London society after the family’s post-Union exodus. Yet her hope for social recognition is thwarted: despite the careful display of many seemingly coveted chinoiserie luxuries scattered throughout her home, such as a Chinese pagoda, Turkish draperies and Tresibond trellises, Lady Clonbrony learns that her decorator, Mr Soho, ‘has played her false’. The Alhambra wallpaper she proudly displays had been rejected by her social superior, the Duchess of Torcaster, just a few weeks earlier, because of their ‘want of proportion’.21 While Edgeworth’s satirising of Lady Clonbrony’s decorative blunder warns the reader against the overblown embrace of the exotic and its too zealous display, her more poignant criticism indicates Lady Clonbrony’s real transgression: she is literally and figuratively out of place. Lady Clonbrony’s social gaffe reveals her lack of knowledge about the conventions of her English home or the rules of tasteful comportment set down by the circle whose manners she




strives to imitate. By the end of the eighteenth century, chinoiserie fell out of favour when the more rational designs of the neoclassical replaced what some considered the chaotic and disorderly patterns inherent to the artistic mode. Furthermore, the style became increasingly associated with femininity, and its use was relegated to intimate personal spaces, such as a lady’s bedroom or a small room used to serve tea or display a china collection.22 As a result, Lady Clonbrony’s misappropriation of the discourse of chinoiserie fails miserably and ultimately exposes her as a social outsider. Edgeworth joins a league of social satirists of the day in her condemnation of Lady Clonbrony’s dependence on chinoiserie, but the critique is levelled not so much at the chinoiserie products themselves as at their appropriation by pseudo-sinophilic social climbers. The embrace of neoclassical designs from architecture to gardens to clothing at the end of the century indicates Britain’s awareness of their progress from a fledgling economic power at the beginning of the century to an international force to be reckoned with by the end. No longer did the English look to the East for economic, political or moral guidance. On the contrary, ‘China-mania’ became the object of derision and a symbol of foreign disruptiveness, ‘in its promiscuous melding of incongruities, its irreverent disregard for authenticity, suggests cultural permeation, plurality, an aesthetic subject cut loose from natural hierarchies of tastes and styles’, as David Porter explains.23 The English and French scenic landscape wallpapers produced after 1780 emphasised a strictly Eurocentric aesthetic – the penchant for the picturesque, a revived interest in classical antiquities, colonial encounters with other cultures, and the burgeoning travel industry and served a function in England’s emerging narrative of empire-building. Many of the scenic landscape wallpapers celebrated English national achievements, political victories and encounters with other lands during trade. Other ‘views’ or ‘long strip landscapes’, as they were called, showed the leisured class enjoying picnics, playing games and communing with nature. The Grand Tour, a social ritual when young men of financial means visited the antiquities of Europe, also inspired many of the scenic panoramic wallpapers. Altogether, these panoramic scenes appealed to bourgeois fantasies about the exotic world at large, their aspirations to emulate their social betters and their fantasies, ultimately inscribing the values of wealthy landowners onto the walls of their homes. The explosive market for scenic landscape wallpaper can be seen as an effort to turn the trade away from foreign influences and to prop up the burgeoning nationalist discourse. ‘China-mania’ and the love of Chinese and chinoiserie designs by the last quarter of the century, with its unfettered designs, in the service of the nationalist project, became gendered as a feminine pursuit and relegated to intimate private spaces, while European-designed scenic landscape wallpapers clearly represented male prerogatives, such as appropriation, colonisation and empire-building. Nationalist sentiment in the last half of the century also inspired an interest in the revival of Gothic decorative design: the English claimed it to be an




architectural style of their own as they (purportedly) were the first to design and construct medieval buildings and churches in this style. The revival of Gothic style prompted the interest in the picturesque, which its chief proponent, William Gilpin, defined as ‘the kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture’. Advocates of the picturesque usually were connoisseurs who went on the Grand Tour and promoted the character of ruins, medieval churches and monuments of noble personages. Clearly, the foreign influence of chinoiserie, with its unregulated patterns and ‘feminine’ designs, could not signify for the British nationalist project like the stately pillars and colossal arches typical of the Gothic style. Horace Walpole claimed ‘his every pagoda took the veil’, and Britons ‘looked askance at the mongrel’ Chinese and ‘transferred their fealty from the flowery empire of Cathay to the grim northern Gothic world’.24 The operative word here is northern, meaning northern England, and therefore a home-grown, national style in which to draw inspiration. These European scenic wallpapers were panoramic in scope and often consisted of numerous, floor-to-ceiling panels that told a story or recalled an adventure. The panorama was a new art-form to come out of late eighteenth-century Europe and its purpose was to reproduce the real world in such a way that spectators could believe they had seen the real thing without leaving their home. However, as time went by, the genre became less about reality and more about capturing the symbolic meaning of a panoramic landscape, or the representation, interpretation and glorification of the world through the eyes of the artist or patron, which could then be promulgated for the edification of the populace. It may be worth considering that at the same time the public clamoured for the large-scale panorama, the social reformer Jeremy Bentham was campaigning for a new type of prison, the panopticon: a carefully designed penal complex governed by the human eye, where prisoners were always visible to their guardians. The notion of the panopticon would allow custodians to exercise power over criminal behaviour by obtaining power over their minds. From this perspective, could the panoramic landscape also inspire (or enforce) notions of patriotism, nationalism and other imperatives through the consistent, creative, visual record of historical events? The purpose of a panorama was to provide a visual overview of an historical event, yet it was impossible to represent a full-scale battle accurately, for instance, even if the artist had an entire room to use as a canvas. Therefore, the medium demanded that the artist conflate the sequence of events surrounding his subject matter. What emerges, then, is something more than a journalistic synopsis. While polemic and propaganda have been evident in artistic endeavours for all of time, the scale of this new art-form often evoked more emotional and physical responses by the viewers. While scenic landscape paintings about matters of interest to the state and worldly conquests were exhibited in largescale installations in public places, when wallpaper manufacturers soon after reproduced these images on paper for the purpose of domestic display, the public world, in effect, entered the sacrosanct private space.




In 1803, Views of Switzerland, published by the French designer Jean Zuber, was the first known panoramic landscape wallpaper to be offered for sale. In the decade to follow, Zuber constructed other breathtaking panoramas such as Views of Italy, Views of Rome, Roman Ruins, Venetian Scenes and Views of Naples – all sites on the Grand Tour itinerary. Extending the ideology of the Grand Tour ethos into the home served as a celebration of neoclassical values and the gentry’s status as the leisured rich, having the time to explore and discover the continent’s natural curiosities. When the tour extended beyond Europe and the Americas, the gentry was provided with even more captivating accounts of exotic people and mysterious places for wallpaper manufacturers to document. Trade and missionary voyages to China and the South Seas also provided rich accounts of treacherous encounters with the noble savage and other uncivilised peoples, inspiring some of the most didactic landscape wallpapers ever produced. Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, also known as Captain Cook’s Voyages (1803), chronicled the expeditions of British naval Captain James Cook in the 1770s and 1780s (Figure 25). A pamphlet explaining the importance of the paper accompanied its purchase: ‘This decoration has for its object the idea of making the public acquainted with peoples and lands discovered by the latest voyagers, and of creating, by means of new comparisons, a community of taste and enjoyment between those who live in a state of civilisation and those who are at the outset of the use of their native intelligence.’25 The same themes embedded in the imitation Chinese wallpapers were repeated in the scenic landscape panels, images of the peaceful Other, which by virtue of a congenital flaw (as the story goes), required and welcomed the economic, spiritual and political guidance of superiors. Joseph Dufor, who designed Captain Cook’s Voyages, understood the serious pedagogical content inherent in his narrative, writing that the ‘history and geography lessons’ a mother’s daughter will learn from the paper ‘will perhaps lead more than once to the kind of awkwardness that calls for a kiss to seal an innocent mouth, in order to preserve her guilelessness’.26 Landscape wallpapers documenting the British encounter with savage peoples as seen in Captain Cook’s Voyages, The Incas, The Hindustan and The Grand Chase of the Tigers of India, served a dual purpose: it justified the British presence in colonised lands and verified European superiority. Zuber’s Views of Brazil embodied this ideology, juxtaposing civilised Europeans with uncivilised Indians of South America. The scenic consisted of 24 lengths (panels) chronicling seemingly disparate themes in an unbroken sequence: the meeting between sophisticated European travels and violent natives, a dark forest, crocodiles, hunting tigers and Brazilian soldiers fighting the natives. Archaeological excavations in Pompeii and Herculaneum and the discovery of the Parthenon marbles, brought to England from Athens in 1806, inspired the vogue for classical Greek interiors. Neoclassicism emphasised a revival in Greek and Roman thought and celebrated simplicity, austerity, heroism and patriotism. The desire to retreat into these themes was important to the British ethos of




Figure 25 Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, from Tableaux-Teintures de Dufour and Leroy. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington, DC.

empire. Wallpaper artists responded by abandoning chinoiserie and focused on copying engravings and paintings of ancient Greek mythology and nostalgic visions of bygone days. *** At the turn of the nineteenth century, the home was considered the most crucial marker of social status. Although domesticity as an ideology was in its early and formative phase during the last half of the eighteenth century, historians agree that there was some acknowledgement that women took a special interest in the arrangement of furnishings and selection of decorative objects displayed in the home. Elizabeth Montagu hints at the division of labour between the sexes when she writes to her friend that she ‘takes greater pleasure in our victories over the French in our conventions of arts than in arms . . . [t]he achievement of Soho instead of making widows and orphans’.27 Furthermore, from an historical perspective, nationalism and gender ideology, generally, work in concert: while men have usually claimed the prerogatives of nation-building,




women have taken on the obligation of sustaining national identity, symbolically, as women in need of defence by the nation’s sons, as mothers who reproduce its citizens and as wives who remain faithful to its protectors, and practically, by tending to the private realm – ‘keep[ing] the homes fires burning’, as the saying goes. The English taste for bringing the outside in, integrating the public world with the private, interestingly contradicted the supposed interiority/femininity associated with the home, opposed to the exteriority/masculinity of the world of commerce, colonisation and war. Landscape wallpapers, therefore, conveyed the public ideologies into the private arena, twisting the two seemingly disparate worlds into one powerful ideology of national superiority. Scenic wallpapers married the private world with commerce, embodying the two primary concerns of the emergent middle class. Yet the relationship between domesticity and the world outside, and even more specifically, a domestic/colonial nexus, rendered both realms interdependent. This can be seen as the landed elite’s nod to bourgeois values of domesticity, morality and family, while simultaneously the middle classes insinuate themselves into the country house ethos. The appropriate use of wealth, whether new money or old, now became one of the new markers of class status. Altogether, the themes of scenic landscape wallpapers produced and sold throughout the eighteenth century – artistry, contemplation, fantasy, leisure activities, primitive peoples and Arcadian paradises – reflect the growing confidence of the eighteenth-century British subject as each decade of the century progressed, from exploration to appropriation to empire. Their taste for bringing the outside in and the visual representations of their preoccupations and fantasies surrounding them in panoramic style reminded Britons of their place at the centre of the cultural landscape and, ultimately, their dominance over it.

Notes 1 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 260–317. 2 Defoe quoted in Maciver Percival, The Chintz Book (London: William Heinemann, 1923), p. 22. 3 Zhang Longxi, Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Difference in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 30. 4 Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), p. 22. 5 William Whitehead quoted in Honour, p. 21. 6 Joanne Kosuda-Warner, Landscape Wallcoverings (London: Scala, 1999), p. 20. 7 Gill Saunders, quoted in Lesley Hoskins, The Papered Wall: History, Pattern, Technique (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), p. 44.




8 Charles C. Oman and Jean Hamilton, Wallpapers: An International History and Illustrated Survey from the Victoria and Albert Museum (New York: Harry Abrams, 1982), p. 24. 9 François Teynac, Wallpaper, A History (New York: Rizzoli, nd), p. 61. 10 Howard Davis, Chinoiserie: Polychrome Decoration on Staffordshire Porcelain 1790–1850 (London: Rubicon Press, 1991), pp. 2, 13. 11 Hoskins, p. 44. 12 Phyllis Ackerman, Wallpaper: Its History, Design, and Use (New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1938), p. 39. 13 Ackerman, p. 38. 14 Sharon Zukin, ‘Landscapes of Economic Value’, in Value, ed. Michael Benedikt (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997), p. 16. 15 Zukin, p. 12. 16 Oliver Bracket, ‘English Wallpapers of the Eighteenth Century’, Connoisseur (1938): 85. 17 Montanus, Arnoldus, Atlas Chinensis (University of Michigan online resources), http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx. 18 John Stalker and George Parker, A Treatise on Japanning and Varnishing (London: Alec Tiranti, 1961 [1688]). 19 Andrew Hadfield, ed., Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2001), p. 5. 20 Susan Staves, ‘A Few Kind Words for the Fop’, Studies in English Literature 22 (1982): 426. 21 Maria Edgeworth, The Absentee, ed. W. J. McCormick and Kim Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 [1812]), pp. 34–5. 22 For discussions about the intersection of chinoiserie and femininity, see Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and David Porter, ‘Monstrous Beauty: Eighteenth-Century Fashion and the Aesthetics of Chinese Taste’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35:3 (2002): 395–411. 23 Porter, p. 408. 24 Honour, p. 142. 25 Catherine Lynn, Wallpapers in America (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), p. 202. 26 Odile Nouvel-Kammener, ed., French Scenic Wallpapers, 1795–1865 (Paris: Flammarion, 2001), p. 104. 27 Elizabeth Montagu, quoted in Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), p. 234.




8 David Porter

From its inception in the seventeenth century, the Royal Society was no friend to poetry. The advancement of the new science, in the view of its champions, required the subordination of language to empirical observation, the unequivocal homage of inconstant words to the unchanging nature of things in themselves. Poets, needless to say, took a dim view of this development, as they staked their livelihood on the very malleability of language that the empiricists condemned. Satire provided sweet revenge: a team of scholars encountered by Swift’s Gulliver during his visit to the Academy of Lagado make themselves ridiculous by taking Thomas Sprat’s denunciations of figural language at face value. Rather than risk the ambiguity and semantic slippage attendant on verbal expression, they have dispensed with words altogether and taken to communicating entirely with things, a collection of which they carry about with them in a handy satchel for deployment at academic meetings and cocktail parties.1 Three hundred years after Sprat published his seminal History of the Royal Society, figural language was chastened anew with an insistence altogether worthy of intrepid seventeenth-century pamphleteers, that words rarely mean what they seem to mean, that they only sporadically mean what their authors meant them to mean, and that they offer at best a fleeting and highly mediated picture of the real world, if, that is, given our collective ideological hallucinations, such a thing can be said to exist. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that some modern scholars, like the linguaphobic projectors of the Lagado Academy, have once again fled the crumbling prisonhouse of language to take refuge in the reassuringly tangible verities of things. The past decade has seen rapid growth in the field of material culture studies. The underlying premise of most of these studies is that the objects of our everyday lives matter in that they serve as repositories and vehicles for a wide range of personal and cultural meanings. The consumption of things, whether for use or display, is an act of creative expression by means of which personal identities and social histories emerge through the continual re-articulation of values such as taste, fashion, status and individuality. Swift’s satire on the 134



Taihu Tatlers: Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade

language projectors notwithstanding, it is clear to anyone who has ever received a gift, admired a colleague’s good taste in dress or arranged knickknacks on a mantelpiece that we do, indeed, communicate through things, and that these things, in turn, can structure our perception of the world in fundamental ways. By investing things with meanings and responding to the meanings others have invested in them, we gain access to a realm of signification that, like verbal language, provides us with the conceptual categories and cognitive tools by which we organise our mental lives. The efficacy of any object in enabling thought or communication, however, depends on our ability to read it. Just as a Chinese character is indecipherable to the average European or, for that matter, its English equivalent to the Chinese peasant, so most meaning-laden things – whether martinis, brand-name clothes or ritual objects – are effectively limited in their usefulness as tools of communication to a single cultural context. This is not to say that goods that move between distant cultures are necessarily stripped of their signifying function, but rather that they tend to lose their original signifying value. Anthropologists who have studied the migration of goods across cultural boundaries have found that the meanings attached to objects are neither permanent nor universal, and that, in fact, consumers confronted with an alien commodity for the first time are remarkably inventive in finding ways to assimilate it within their local world of goods, giving it a completely new set of meanings in the process.2 When Mary Wortley Montagu visited a Turkish bathhouse, to take a well-known eighteenth-century example, her bemused interlocutors interpreted her corset not as a marker of genteel femininity, but rather as the cruel contrivance of a jealous husband for preserving his wife’s chastity.3 In general, it seems reasonable to assume that in cases where the original meaning of an object, like a corset or a yellow ribbon or a judge’s gavel, derives primarily from its relative position within a local semiotic system, that meaning will be lost in translation to another cultural context. Meanings that are the product of arbitrary convention, that is, do not travel well. But what of a case where the original meaning of an object is not merely conventional, but rather is at least partly encoded within the object itself? Utilitarian objects fall into this category: the use-value of a knife or a bowl is readily apparent from its shape. Decorated objects present a more complicated case. The scenes depicted on a painted dish can be interpreted to a certain extent. But what of the manner in which the scenes are depicted? Assuming an artist’s style and the aesthetic tradition from which it derives can be described and understood in conceptual terms, to what extent can such aesthetic ideas be recovered from a decorative object when it is transplanted to a new cultural context? Foreign styles are often successfully imitated, of course, by local artists and craftsmen. The more interesting question is whether the consumer of such an object might begin, in more subtle ways, to understand and respond to the aesthetic ideas inscribed in its design by its original creators.



Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade 135

The mania for Chinese and Chinese-styled goods which swept England in the first half of the eighteenth century provides a rich test case for the study of this question. The emergence of tea as a fashionable beverage created a demand for the accessories of the tea table, which in turn stimulated interest in the Chinese furniture, wallpapers, textiles and architectural designs that became a ubiquitous presence in homes and gardens by 1750.4 The artistic vision represented by Chinese goods and their European imitations was, for the most part, entirely novel. How did contemporary consumers interpret and respond to the appearance of this alien aesthetic in their midst? The considerable scholarship that has been devoted to the phenomenon of the Chinese taste calls attention to four distinct forms of engagement and response. The most immediate, visceral response was no doubt one of wonder, the sheer delight in the spectacle of the unfamiliar that is the common currency of the exotic and that was typically subsumed, within eighteenthcentury aesthetic theory, under the categories of the novel and the strange. The pleasures afforded by Chinese exoticism led to a second type of response: stylistic assimilation. English craftsmen responded to consumers’ attraction to Chinese goods first by imitating their designs and motifs, then blending them with French rococo influences to create a new hybrid style. The rapid popularisation of the Chinese taste led, in turn, to a sharp backlash against it on the part of critics who perceived it as an unwelcome foreign challenge to the dominance of the Palladian vision. And intermingled with all three of these was what we might call a proto-Orientalist response, combining the smug pleasure of ownership of foreign goods with the construction of feminising fantasies about Chinese culture on the basis of the playful garden scenes found on porcelains and lacquer ware.5 These four types of responses – wonder, assimilation, repudiation and fantasy – aptly characterise the most prominent effects of the appearance of Chinese goods in the English marketplace. But they would arguably apply equally well to the arrival of any exotic foreign style in any cultural context. They are responses, that is, to the exotic merely as cipher, without any specific reference to the social, historical or indeed aesthetic particularities of their culture of origin. Recognising these four responses, in other words, does not get us very far in addressing the central question I have posed, namely, whether aesthetic ideas embedded in decorative objects can be translated across cultural boundaries. The adaptation of a Chinese design by Chippendale or Pillement no doubt entails a certain type of translation, but whatever sustained engagement with the aesthetic ideas of the original work takes place in such a case is limited to the individual artist. I am more interested in considering the experience of the consumer, and in exploring the hypothesis that certain complex aesthetic ideas of the Ming dynasty might to some degree have been reconstituted on the arrival of Chinese wares in English sitting rooms. In order to isolate a specific set of Chinese aesthetic ideas for study, I will focus on a single visual icon of particular importance within traditional literati



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culture: the contorted garden rock or scholar’s stone (Figure 26). As elements in garden design, landscape painting and decorative arts of all kinds, strangely shaped rocks and mountains have a prominence and significance that is nearly unrivalled in Ming iconography. Curiously twisted, pitted and pockmarked rocks appear as central features in all manner of visual compositions, their unusual shapes teasing the eye with the paradoxical contrast between their sheer physical mass and the sinuous lightness of their form.6 Scholars are regularly depicted conversing in the company of large rocks. Gardens are laid out so as to provide a variety of vantage points for the contemplation of rocks. A renowned magistrate from Wuhei province, Mi Fu, is celebrated in paintings for having famously kowtowed before a particularly impressive rock, which he thereafter addressed respectfully as shixiong, or ‘elder brother

Figure 26

Stone in Suzhou garden. Photo by author.




stone’. If I may risk a single sweeping generalisation, it is fair to say that the visual traditions we associate with early modern China would be inconceivable in the absence of these contorted heaps of pitted stone.7 Certainly in eighteenth-century England, the vision of China that consumers derived from the decorated porcelains, lacquer wares and wall hangings that crowded East India Company warehouses and fashionable sitting rooms prominently featured these geological curiosities. The fact that so many local imitations of these Chinese wares replicated this distinctive iconography suggests that the presence of strangely twisted rocks soon became a recognisable hallmark of the so-called Chinese style. If the elite Chinese obsession with rocks, and the veneration in which they were held by Ming artists and connoisseurs, have an analogue in the western tradition, it might be found in Pygmalion’s legendary infatuation with a particularly well-turned piece of marble. And indeed, the centrality of the rock in Ming aesthetics invites a broader comparison with that of the statue or the statuesque human figure in western art.8 Both the contorted rock and the statuesque figure had, by the eighteenth century, long been prominent characteristic elements in the paintings and the gardens of their respective traditions. Both were emblems of elite status display and objects of connoisseurship valued in part for the allusions they embodied to an ancient literary canon and a revered classical past. While both were emblems of a tradition of visual culture that prized disinterested aesthetic contemplation, they also participated as commodities in lively consumer societies in which the ownership of objects of taste was a widely recognised, if not infallible marker of class status.9 Most importantly for our purposes, however, both Chinese rocks and the statuesque figures of western painting and sculpture attracted the attention of the scribbling tribe. Writers in China and England concerned with codifying artistic norms and ideals in their respective cultures were drawn to these icons as paradigmatic expressions of the highest aesthetic values. If my hypothesis about the transfer of aesthetic ideas through the medium of decorative goods is correct, then comparing these two codifying discourses should help us identify some of the specific aesthetic concepts that might have been transmitted to western consumers of Chinese wares in the eighteenth century. Owing in part, I suspect, to the very real challenges posed to traditional western conceptions of beauty by these Asian imports, the eighteenth century proved fertile ground for the emergence of aesthetic theory in England. Beginning with Shaftesbury and encompassing writers as varied as Addison, Hutcheson, Hogarth, Hume, Burke, Gerard, Alison and Gilpin, this centurylong conversation on questions of taste and beauty charted the period’s evolving conceptions of aesthetic value and of the faculties required to appreciate it.10 The most representative of this group, however, the writer who achieved the highest stature as both artist and theorist and whose writings best express the contemporary art world’s characteristic reverence for tradition, rigid hierarchies of value and preoccupation with the statuesque human form,



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is doubtless Joshua Reynolds. Reynolds’ Discourses on Art is a series of fifteen lectures delivered to students at the Royal Academy which at once summarise the art theory of the preceding 300 years and lay down a set of precepts to guide the education of the serious aspiring artist. Highly regarded in his own time and our own, the work can be taken as broadly representative of the dominant strand of British aesthetic theory during this period. When we turn to China, the situation is considerably more complex. There is no single work on art that enjoyed the prominence of Reynolds’ Discourses in early modern China. There seems to be far less interest, in fact, in developing and arguing over abstract notions of beauty in the first place, with the result that we do not really find a genre comparable to the aesthetic treatise in China before the twentieth century. As a result, historians of Chinese art have drawn on a variety of works – including poetry, essays, connoisseurs’ guides and manuals of taste – in their attempts to reconstruct some of the dominant ideas associated with valued works of Chinese visual culture. Given space limitations, I will be able to outline in only fairly broad strokes some of the crucial differences in the ways these two highly complex aesthetic paradigms treat a central element in their respective iconographic traditions. For Reynolds, the fundamental purpose of every serious artist is to transcend the particularities of nature and the vicissitudes of local fashion in the pursuit of ideal beauty. In painting or sculpting the human form, which is the highest manifestation of this ideal, the artist draws on his observation not just of the live model before him, but of all the models of humanity he has ever studied, whether in the flesh or in the best works of past masters. His task is then to abstract from the incidental deformities of actual bodies to realise the ideal form of which the most graceful of living creatures is but an imperfect approximation. To approach this timeless ideal is to leave behind the accidents of time, place and physical idiosyncrasy that separate the world of the artist from that represented in his art.11 Reynolds is unequivocal in sustaining this distinction: There are excellencies in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imitation of nature . . . The poets, orators, and rhetoricians of antiquity, are continually enforcing this position; that all the arts receive their perfection from an ideal beauty, superior to what is to be found in individual nature . . . For the works of nature are full of disproportion, and fall very short of the true standard of beauty.12 Trying to extrapolate from Chinese sources a general theory of art comparable in purpose, scope and cultural standing to that elaborated in Reynolds’ Discourses is fraught with methodological pitfalls. Quite apart from the everpresent dangers of reductive generalisation, the comparative framework itself may tempt us to impose decidedly non-Chinese patterns of thought and analysis onto the Chinese conceptual landscape. If we approach Chinese aesthetic




theory, that is, with the aim of identifying specific features that are in some respect analogous to those that define aesthetic theory in the West, we will wind up with a picture that, while nominally Chinese in its particulars, will be decidedly western in its priorities and principles of organisation. And though I will continue to use the term, I do so with the awareness that the very category of the aesthetic, being the product of a distinctly European cultural history, may itself introduce distortions of this kind in that it marks off a privileged space for a distinct type of experience that may not, a priori, be recognised as such within other cultural milieux. I will proceed with the comparison, then, from the premise that the two discourses may be fundamentally incompatible not only in the aesthetic values that they celebrate, but also in the very questions that they pose about the nature and purpose of aesthetic value. It will quickly become apparent that Reynolds’ theory, for all its implicit claims to universality, proves woefully inadequate as a description of Chinese artistic practice, and that its three foundational precepts would seem to have no legitimate place within early modern Chinese discourses about art. To begin with, the unquestioned pre-eminence of the human form as the manifestation of the highest ideals of art makes little or no sense in the Chinese context. Rocks or mountains are much more commonly the central subject of visual compositions in Chinese paintings and receive considerably more attention in commentaries on works of art. Landscape, rather than anthropocentric history painting, was accordingly the most highly esteemed genre among elite classes in the Ming and Qing dynasties.13 One of the central organising principles in Chinese landscape painting and gardening is the balance or tension between eternally opposed forces, yin and yang, water and rock, earth and sky. Human figures, like pine trees, typically represent a merely transient, intermediate state between these poles rather than the fully consummated pinnacle of divine creation.14 For Reynolds and the tradition he represents, the human drama depicted in a painting is the source of its emotional resonance, while the disposition of human figures is the principal source of aesthetic pleasure. For his Chinese counterparts, the satisfaction to be found in gazing on a painting is far more likely to be evoked by the juxtaposition of a rock and a tree and by the subtle delineation of their intricate forms. The second Reynoldsian precept that falls flat in the Chinese context is the notion of beauty as the gold standard for assessing the value of a work of art. Indeed, the very concept of beauty, let alone the abstracted notion of ‘ideal beauty’, is entirely absent from most elite descriptions and assessments of art works in early modern China. Delicate court ladies may be beauties, and the experience of contemplating art is sometimes compared with that of gazing at a beautiful woman, but beauty does not appear as a primary category of aesthetic analysis per se.15 Nor is there any analogous category of aesthetic description that organises questions and ideas about art with the centrifugal force exercised by the idea of beauty in the West. The concept that perhaps comes closest in its prominence is that of energy flow, or qi in Chinese. This is



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the same qi we hear about in connection with Chinese martial arts, like qigong, acupuncture, and other forms of Chinese medicine, with their emphasis on regulating the proper flow of energy through the body. Qi is not, in other words, an aesthetic category so much as a cosmological one that is manifest in effective visual compositions. Rocks and mountains, whether in a landscape or a landscape painting, are often described as embodying this energy in its purest form. As one Ming commentator writes, ‘The purest essence of the energy of the heaven-earth world coalesces into rock. It emerges, bearing the soil. Its formations are wonderful and fantastic. Some with cavernous cliffs, revealing their interior; some with peaks and summits in sharp-edged layers.’16 The energy flow through the rocks and soil of a landscape is set in motion by the tension between the opposing yin and yang elements it contains. Like the flow of blood through the arteries of the body, the circulation of qi between these poles sustains and animates the landscape. Whereas beauty for Reynolds is a timeless, transcendent and hence rather static ideal, qi is associated with the idea of constant flux and transformation. Finally, Reynolds’ notion that the best art transcends the particularities of nature would appear utterly nonsensical to his Chinese contemporary, for the simple reason that the art/nature dichotomy is a false one within the Chinese framework. Whereas Reynolds banishes the strange, deformed or idiosyncratic from his aesthetic vision, the Chinese literati have traditionally embraced them. Singularity is, indeed, among the very highest of aesthetic values; a bizarre, contorted rock formation is prized for its rarity and said to surpass the skill of the most accomplished artisan.17 Far from transcending nature in the pursuit of an abstract ideal, such oddly shaped rocks in a garden or a painting help to evoke the metonymic identity of the composition and the natural world: as the introduction to a catalogue by the twelfth-century collector Du Wan put it, ‘within the size of a fist can be assembled the beauty of a thousand cliffs’.18 The qi that animates the mountains and rivers of the earth surges with equal potency through their artistic representations, so that a miniature composition literally embodies on a smaller scale the forces of the cosmos. While harbouring no illusions that the thumbnail sketch I have provided will be nearly as effective as a fist-sized rock in evoking the entire cosmos of Chinese aesthetics, I will conclude my comparison here, and turn now to the question of whether, and if so how, this rather alien system of thought might have insinuated itself into the minds of Reynolds’ contemporaries through the medium of Chinese export wares and their European imitations. I will grant at the outset that this is a highly speculative exercise. My quest for a smoking gun has to date proved unsuccessful. My perusal of reams of archival documents has yet to turn up a single letter from a tea-sipping connoisseur waxing eloquent on the cosmic energy flow pulsating among the sinuous rocks depicted on her china teapot. Indeed, we have little direct evidence at all of what eighteenth-century consumers thought of the Chinese-style goods they purchased and admired or of the ideas they associated with them. We can,




however, make some informed inferences based on what we know of the social contexts of this consumption and the reactions it provoked among contemporary cultural critics. Chinese goods, it is clear, were collected and enjoyed by men and women in the early eighteenth century. But a preponderance of evidence, historical and literary, suggests that their principal consumers were women.19 Trade records, furthermore, along with a vast body of contemporary writings, corroborate the clichés, first, that the most commonly encountered vehicle for the Chinese style in pictorial representation was porcelain tea ware and second, that the most common context in which this foreign style would have been viewed, commented on and potentially translated into the realm of social discourse would have been the decidedly feminine space of the domestic tea party.20 Here, too, the gender lines are far from absolute. Men also drank tea, of course, and are included in the many conversation pieces that portray as a domestic ideal a well-heeled family gathered around an elegant tea setting. But certainly in the popular imagination, and, judging from letters, diaries, plays, novels and popular prints, very often in daily practice, the tea table provided a privileged space for intimate conversation among English women of all social classes. We cannot, alas, recover the content of these conversations. We can, however, on the basis of the same considerable body of sources, safely surmise that the purpose of many of them was gossip. The history of gossip obviously pre-dates the early eighteenth century, but gossip as a distinct discursive form does emerge into a prominent notoriety precisely during this period, both through widespread satirical denunciations of the practice and the emergence of that newly popular literary genre of scandal-writing most closely associated with writers like Delarivier Manley.21 Taking gossip seriously as an historical or literary phenomenon requires, of course, that we peel away the moralising judgements that for centuries have condemned and trivialised it as a vain and meddlesome folly, so much idle women’s chatter. Once we consider it in a more objective light, we can begin to recognise it as a legitimate, rule-bound discursive practice that serves distinct social and even aesthetic functions. In her marvellous study of the cultural history of gossip, Patricia Meyer Spacks describes it as a structured and purposeful conversational form that, at its best, resembles a work of art.22 Though Spacks does not pursue the analogy between gossip and art, her suggestion raises the intriguing question of just what sort of art good gossip most closely resembles, and what kinds of aesthetic ideas gossip, viewed as art, might be taken to promote. While it would be going a step too far to suggest that every tea-sipping tatler in eighteenth-century England was, in her aesthetic predilections, a sinophilic petromaniac, both the narrative structure and social function of gossip, as Spacks describe them, suggest much closer affinities with Chinese rocks than with classical statuary and a more obvious kinship with the flux and flow of qi than with a static ideal of perfect beauty as the sine qua non of aesthetic



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experience. The tea-sipping tatler of the early eighteenth century, I would audaciously suggest, found in her Chinese porcelains, fire-screens and needlework patterns an imaginative vision that resonated deeply with her discursive habits and desires, that set the tone for her conversations and that offered glimpses of an aesthetic ideology in which the transgressive undercurrents of women’s chatter might, for once, be acclaimed and legitimised rather than viciously condemned. Limitations of space allow me to point only briefly to three of the many points of possible convergence between the aesthetics of gossip and of the Chinese taste. The first, and most obvious, is the manifest delight they both share in the strange, curious or unexpected. The twisted rocks that provide the focal point and set the stylistic tone for so many characteristically Chinese images are undeniably bizarre. Both Chinese and western writers, in spite of the differences in the aesthetic paradigms within which they operate, use strikingly similar adjectives to describe these rocks and the compositions built around them: they appear to both groups of writers as surprising, odd, wild, bizarre, singular, strange and, above all, curious. The moral judgement that inflects these terms tends to be far less favourable in the western descriptions than in the Chinese, but the initial reaction of surprise and curiosity itself is universal.23 If we turn back now from the contorted landscapes painted on many an old china teapot to the conversation that once swirled around it, do we not find that curiosity and surprise, wildness and singularity are the essential affective principles of gossip as well? We gossip, according to Spacks, out of an insatiable desire to surprise ourselves and our friends with the unseemly excesses of human behaviour, to vicariously gratify our curiosity about inaccessible realms of experience, to reveal in others the wild, untamed impulses we have successfully concealed in ourselves.24 Scandal attracts us precisely because it flouts prescribed conventions and moral ideals. The scandalous transgression is the social equivalent of the physical deformity or singularity Reynolds sought to banish from the canvasses of the Royal Academy. As the subject of conversation, it is the nearly precise discursive equivalent of a Chinese garden rock. The curiosity that animates gossip resonates on a second level with these geological masterpieces. The strangeness of many a Chinese rock is owing to the foraminate structure we see in the pockmarks and holes that scar its surface. These pits and craters, carved into limestone boulders by underwater currents, not only add to the singularity of the formation for Chinese connoisseurs, but also contribute to an effect of continual movement and transformation and an outward manifestation of inner structure highly prized among artists and collectors.25 When we admire a marble statue, the eye is soothed by the uniformity of a finely polished surface and invited by the smoothness of its contours to apprehend the insistent formal unity of the composition as a whole. When we gaze upon a Taihu rock, in contrast, the eye is endlessly perplexed by the intricacy of surfaces, led in restless pursuit into and through




endless crevices and cavities, never permitted to settle or to proclaim its apprehension of the whole. It is this restless pursuit that suggests a second analogy with gossip. For if curiosity, as a desire to know, characterises the motive force of gossip, as a mode of action curiosity also describes its method. According to Barbara Benedict, early modern curiosity was all about the restless pursuit of unsanctioned forms of knowledge, it was a form of transgressive penetration, a relentless, unseemly probing into matters best left untouched.26 What better visual metaphor for this pursuit than a prodigy of pitted limestone? The English gossip, I would suggest, is the kindred spirit of the Chinese rock connoisseur in her privileging of interiority over superficiality and in her imaginative revelation of hidden spaces dizzying in their fractal-like complexity. It passed for a truism in early modern diatribes against gossip that female chatter was a profoundly anti-social form of behaviour. Gossips tattled with poison tongues, maliciously destroying the reputations of their rivals through their relentless insinuations of scandal. And yet, as Spacks points out, the destructive potential of scandalmongering is only one half of a complex story. While gossip often sets out to destroy or undermine certain social bonds, it unquestionably strengthens others. The participants in a gossip session are, after all, bound together into an implicit community of the righteous through the mutual sharing of damaging secrets about those outside their circle.27 This simultaneous sustenance and destruction of social ties is, for Spacks, one of several facets of a fundamental dialectic that structures the psychological and social workings of gossip. Our delight in gossip, to point to another, requires an implicit set of shared norms against which the censurable behaviour in question stands in a dialectical relation of wilful transgression or ignorance. And in a final paradox, the very act of discussing the libidinous exploits of the shameless bed-hoppers among us provides a sanctioned outlet for vicarious sexual pleasure that owes much of its psychic charge to an uneasy tension between our vicarious pleasure and the moralising posture that enables us to indulge it. Spacks links this recursively dialectical structure of gossip to its irresistible energy and generative force. Just as a novel like Pamela (1740) achieves an emotional charge by encouraging the reader’s sympathy with the opposing voices of the heroine’s mind and heart, so gossip attains both its narrative drama and verbal profuseness, she suggests, through a dynamic confrontation between principles of excess and control.28 Spacks’ description of the relentless energy of gossip helps, I think, to illuminate her provocative claim that this most benighted of conversational forms may occasionally approach the status of art. The aesthetic implicit in such a conception, though, is far removed from the dominant eighteenth-century notion of ideal beauty. It resembles far more closely the dialectical dynamic of yin and yang that animates a Ming landscape composition. This dialectic is, according to theorists of the tradition, often most visibly present in the juxtaposition of rock and flowing water, but it is also expressed in the visual indeterminacy of particular rock formations or of the boundaries between



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water, rock, mist, and sky, which often seem to flow into or out of one another like a cloud brushing a tree-lined mountain top. The experience of ambiguity and restless movement in such compositions brings with it the expectation of transformation and perpetual change. The energy flowing through rocks and mountains is linked to this transformative capacity, so that what may first appear an emblem of solidity is also a reminder of flux and decay, and there is a constant sense of transition between these two states. It is precisely this dialectical energy flow within the composition that generates the aesthetic charge of the work as a whole.29 I have suggested three parallels between the poetics of gossip and a type of Chinese artistic iconography and pictorial style widely disseminated in early eighteenth-century England. The mere existence of such parallels, of course, proves nothing in itself: it may simply be a curious coincidence, like the simultaneous emergence of the novelistic form in eighteenth-century England and China. But given the ubiquity of Chinese and Chinese-styled goods in this period, their demonstrable association with female sociability, and the ferocity with which the nation’s self-proclaimed guardians of taste lashed out against the style and its partisans, I suspect there may well have been a significant flow of energy, so to speak, between the discursive and visual realms of the kind I have suggested here. I am not advocating a direct causal connection, but rather a profound and mutually reinforcing resonance between the closely intertwined activities of looking and speaking within a particular social context. To suppose that an eighteenth-century consumer might have internalised something of the imaginative sensibility implicit in Chinese art would not necessarily require that she consciously understand, articulate or imitate it. It might, however, entail a subtle recalibration of aesthetic values and proclivities, an adjustment which in turn could quite plausibly find expression in corresponding modes of social interaction. While we must finally concede to Swift the inadequacy of things as substitutes for words, it is clear that things can, none the less, speak to us in complex and compelling ways and affect us deeply in what they say. Aesthetics, it is often claimed, is a form of ideology. If eighteenth-century consumers were entranced by the visual charms of Chinese porcelains and lacquer wares, their pleasure may well have encouraged the cultivation of habits of perception and response that transposed elements of a Chinese value system into English social practice.

Notes 1 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Penguin, 1985), pp. 230–1. 2 See, for example, Alfred Gell, ‘Newcomers to the World of Goods: Consumption among the Muria Gonds’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997),




3 4

5

6 7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21

22

pp. 110–38; and Eric Arnould and Richard Wilk, ‘Why do the Natives Wear Adidas?’, Advances in Consumer Research 11 (1984): 748–52. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters, ed. Isobel Grundy (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 148–9. The best introductions to chinoiserie are Hugh Honour, Chinoiserie: The Vision of Cathay (New York: Dutton, 1962); and Dawn Jacobson, Chinoiserie (London: Phaidon, 1993). For a comprehensive overview of this period of British fascination with China, see William Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the 17th and 18th Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951); or David Porter, Ideographia: The Chinese Cipher in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). On the relationship between rococo and the Chinese taste in England, see Jacobson, Chinoiserie, pp. 123–50. The best treatment of the classicist response to the Chinese taste is Beverly Allen, Tides in English Taste, 2 vols. (New York: Pageant, 1958), 1: 234–56. On the pleasures of mercantile fantasy, see Louis Landa, ‘Pope’s Belinda, the General Emporie of the World, and the Wondrous Worm’, South Atlantic Quarterly 70 (1971): 215–35. On the feminisation of images of China in chinoiserie, see Porter, pp. 181–92. John Hay, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China Institute in America, 1986), p. 27. The best introductions to rock sculpture and its place in Chinese art and culture are John Hay, ‘The Rock and Chinese Art’, Orientations 16.12 (1985): 16–32; and Hay, Kernels of Energy. The comparison is suggested in Hay, ‘The Rock and Chinese Art’, p. 18. Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 68–103. A representative selection of the essays comprising this conversation can be found in Dabney Townsend, ed., Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics (Amityville: Baywood, 1999). Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses, ed. Pat Rogers (New York: Penguin, 1992), pp. 102–9. Reynolds, pp. 102–4. See, for example, Thomas Lawton, Chinese Figure Painting (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1973), p. ix. Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 52. Hay, ‘The Rock and Chinese Art’, p. 28. Introduction to Du Wan’s Stone Catalogue of Cloudy Forest, quoted in Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 38. Hay, Kernels of Energy, pp. 24, 38. Introduction to Wan, quoted in Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 38. See, for example, Anna Somers Cocks, ‘The Nonfunctional Use of Ceramics in the English Country House during the Eighteenth Century’, in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, ed. Gervase Jackson-Stops (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1989), pp. 195–215. See Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 19–36. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Knopf, 1985), pp. 40, 156; Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 114–52. Spacks, p. 13.



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23 For notable examples, see Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 40; Maggie Keswick, The Chinese Garden (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), pp. 158–62; Louis Le Comte, Memoirs and Observations made in a late Journey through the Empire of China (London, 1697), pp. 166–7; Allen, pp. 234–56. 24 Spacks, pp. 11, 32, 60, 151. 25 Hay, Kernels of Energy, p. 44. 26 Barbara Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 1–23. 27 Spacks, pp. 22–7. 28 Spacks, pp. 132–47. 29 Hay, Kernels of Energy, pp. 42–50.




9 Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace

Here, there is one, arbitrary, universal tyrant, and like the lama of Thibet he never dies. FASHION is his name. This stirring declaration comes from the opening salvo of Hannah More’s 1805 essay entitled ‘Hints towards forming a Bill for the Abolition of the White Slave Trade, in the Cities of London and Westminster’. Though she had anonymously published the essay in The Weekly Entertainer; or agreeable and instructive repository, More eventually included it in her 1818 Collected Works, under a new, shorter title: ‘The White Slave Trade’.1 Through this new title, More signalled that the essay might be read as a companion piece to her earlier work, ‘The Black Slave Trade’ – alternatively entitled ‘Slavery: A Poem’ – published in 1788. I will argue here that More’s essay can be consider in two different contexts: on the one hand, this piece is a biting satire revealing an intimate knowledge of issues arising in relation to the slave trade – not just the lives of slaves, but also the arguments circulating in relation to abolition. The essay hints as well at More’s meliorist position on slavery. On the other, however, in light of recent work on the representation of slavery by Saidiya Hartman, Marcus Wood and others, More’s essay warrants closer scrutiny for the questions it provokes concerning the polemical appropriation of images of enslaved Africans.2 If Hannah More participates in a significant late eighteenth-century backlash against consumption, she also renders affluent white women as the unthinking victims of an anthropomorphised male tyrant, a figure known as ‘Fashion’.3 Even as she promotes the idea of a ‘deep’ female subject, one remarkable for her spirituality and her resistance to material culture, she also denies women the agency that potentially comes from meaningful interaction with a world of goods. My reading of this essay comes at a time when the nature of More’s politics has become highly contested. Sentiments have run deep, with supporters finding much to praise in More’s advocacy for middle-class women, her articulation of a feminocentric platform and her realistic appraisal of women’s education in relation to their station. More’s supporters admire her reasonable interventions in an existing social and political discourse, and they champion her positions 148



White Slavery: Hannah More, Women and Fashion

on education for the lower orders as sensible ideas for an otherwise inflammatory age.4 Those who express caution in light of the model of female advocacy that More proposes query the essentialism that underlies her concept of female advocacy, and they remain sceptical of an approach that is arguably complicit with traditional patriarchal politics. Yet far from disliking More’s politics for its refusal to go in revolutionary directions, they regret opportunities that were lost in her decision to stabilise a political status quo that unjustly privileged some over others.5 Each side in this debate attempts to take the moral high ground: More’s supporters make claims for a humanitarianism grounded in the kind of responsibility that can lie in traditional, deferential hierarchy, while detractors express concern about More’s persistent elitism, her refusal to grant self-determination to those for whom she claims to advocate. In the end, several truths about More are in play simultaneously: she was a conservative thinker with many radical components to her thought, a powerful advocate for women’s influence who recommended neither that they assume public responsibilities nor that they imitate her own model of public intervention. She was deeply and sincerely committed to advancing and protecting the interests of those whom she never saw as her equals. As an essay, ‘The White Slave Trade’ proves a compelling test case for a reading that seeks to find multiple truths at work in More’s oeuvre. While there is no question that the protective sentiments it advances are sincere, in the end it speaks on behalf of a female subject who is only spoken for, whose historical and material conditions remain silenced. More’s rhetoric participates and extends key rhetorical constructions of the day, constructions she certainly did not invent, but which she used to advance her argument. To the extent that those constructions offered a limited humanitarianism, in which human agency was compromised by the very structure of the debate, More remains at best a problematic advocate for women. This essay begins with a close reading of the tropes that organise More’s essay. It briefly surveys relevant biographical background to understand the issues that produced More’s commitment to abolitionist rhetoric, and it pauses to consider how the issue of agency is deployed in her poem ‘The Black Slave Trade’. Lastly, it asks how More’s advocacy for women may have been constrained by a problematic rhetorical tradition that had already left enslaved Africans without the ability to speak on their own behalf. Thus ‘The White Slave Trade’ begins by parodying a form of abolitionist discourse that had sought parliamentary change: ‘Whereas many members of both houses of parliament have long been indefatigably laboring to bring in a bill for the amelioration of the conditions of slaves in our foreign plantations, as well as for the abolition of the trade itself . . .’. It continues by requesting that ‘benevolent senators’ additionally take up the case of ‘wives, daughters, aunts, nieces, cousins, and grandmothers even of those very zealous African abolitionists themselves’ (p. 36). Not until the third paragraph does it reveal its central, ironic comparison: white women, enthralled by fashion, are like Africans enslaved by the slave trade. Like their black counterparts, women of fashion



Hannah More, Women and Fashion 149

are ‘forced away . . . from all the endearing connections of domestic life, separated from their husbands, dragged from their children’ (p. 37). Both enslaved Africans and fashionable women ‘go nearly naked’. Younger slaves of both types in particular ‘are condemned to violent bodily labour from midnight to sunrise’ – as white women are presumably forced to participate in various social rituals, while older slaves remain ‘firmly chained’ to their worktables (pp. 37–8). Like black slavery, white enthrallment to fashion injures ‘fair and lawful’ commerce by training and overworking the slaves and exploiting their soonto-be depleted resources, rather than promoting conditions leading to their long-term health and industriousness. White slavery – presumably here denoting the conditions of a demanding social season with its visiting, parties and balls – gluts the market, making it impossible to discriminate among the slaves; the ‘promiscuous huddling’ of the white slaves (or their assembly in public places) together impairs ‘youth and beauty’ (p. 39). Lastly, the white slave trade – or the subjection of women to fashion – is ‘the most improvident waste of the human species’: What devastation is made in the human frame among our white slaves, by working over hours, by loss of sleep, want of clothing, fetid atmospheres, being crammed in the holds of smaller ships without their proper proportion of inches – what havoc, I say, is made by all those, and many other causes, let all the various baths and watering places, to which these poor exhausted slaves are sent every summer to recruit, after the working season is over, declare. (p. 40) At times, the satire also insists on how being enslaved to fashion may actually be worse: the elderly white slave, for instance, remains enthralled by the ‘public market’, or marriage market, long past the time that her daughter is taken off her hands, with no effort made to legislate her condition. In addition, white slaves are ‘more abridged’ in their rest. Unlike black slaves who may enjoy their Sabbath rest under the auspices of a kindly master, white slaves labour even on Sundays (p. 37). Clearly, then, More’s essay demands to be read as a satirical intervention in an existing conversation about the nature of women’s agency: should women continue to participate in a ‘market’ that exploits them, putting them out for display in fashionable places like the assembly room or spa and announcing their value as partners to possible bidders/husbands, or should they refuse to be bought and sold, seizing instead the opportunity to withdraw from the public eye and seeking out more meaningful kinds of activity? The tone is, no doubt, ironic and deliberately provocative. By means of the analogy, More intends to shock and produce a strong moral response. The point of the satirical comparison is to show an apparently innocuous situation for what it really is, while the goal of the satire is to advance an alternative social agenda, in which




her readers take very seriously the idea that women’s true mission is more private, domestic and familial in nature. Arguably, agency is extended to women who only need refuse to participate in an oppressive social situation. However, how does More’s analogy further work? What does it mean ironically to deploy an abolitionist rhetoric on behalf of women’s liberation from a socially oppressive state? To answer these questions, it is helpful to review More’s association with the abolitionist movement, an association that generated not only her first understanding of the conditions of slavery, but also the conditions for her own authority. According to her biographers, in 1786 Lady Middleton – the first woman known to be associated with the movement and the author of two anti-slavery pamphlets – introduced More to the abolitionist cause.6 More also gained first-hand access to testimony on the horrors of slavery from James Ramsay, friend to Lady Middleton, and a rector at St Kitts for 27 years.7 A quick convert to the abolitionist cause, More campaigned for a production of Thomas Southerne’s play Oroonoko, based on Aphra Behn’s novel, at Drury Lane, despite her growing wariness of the stage, rationalising that ‘so many go to a play who will never go to church’.8 She hoped to find someone who would write a new prologue for the play that would be ‘descriptive of the miseries of those wretched negroes’.9 Then, in 1788 she hastily wrote her own poem against the evils of the slave trade, wishing to publish it to coincide with Wilberforce presenting his anti-slavery resolution to parliament, and thereby to galvanise public support.10 ‘Slavery: A Poem’ was followed in 1795 by a Cheap Repository ballad entitled ‘The Sorrows of Yamba; or the Negro Woman’s Lament’. Besides publishing on the subject of slavery, More took up the abolitionist cause in other ways: for instance, as early as 1788 she urged her friends to boycott sugar. Also, in order to elicit support for the movement, she sold prints based on portraits in oil of a Negro boy painted by the philanthropist Elizabeth Bouverie. In addition, More is known to have carried to evening parties the famous ‘Plan of an African Ship’s Lower Deck with Negroes in the proportion of only One to a Ton’, a drawing produced by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, depicting slaves lying crammed side by side in rigid rows in the hold of a ship, by way of further garnering support for the abolitionist cause.11 Among all her biographers, Ann Stott provides the most balanced overview of More’s complicated sentiments on the slave trade and the enslaved Africans themselves. On the one hand, writes Stott, in her abolitionist work More consistently criticises British hypocrisy and runs a dangerous political risk. There is no question, from this perspective, that More’s commitment to the abolitionist cause was sincere, deep or genuinely humanistic. On the other hand, however (and here Stott paraphrases Linda Colley), ‘Abolition legitimised Britain’s claim to be the arbiter of the civilised and civilising world, and gave the governing elite a painless way of claiming moral superiority’.12 In other words, More’s advocacy of abolition also positioned her in relation to an emerging group – men like William Wilberforce and John Newton – for whom the project of ‘freeing




the slaves’ was also a way to construct themselves as superior moral agents. To acknowledge this is not to undercut the important nature of the abolitionist project. Nor is it necessarily to cast doubt on the motives of the abolitionists: a sincere and genuine commitment to an unpopular political position, a risky public stance taken on behalf of those who seem powerless to advocate for themselves, can easily coexist with an opportunity entailing a degree of selfpromotion. High moral purpose is often accomplished by those who, in one way or another, also gain something personally. Moreover, as Stott argues, it is important not to underestimate ‘the hard fight the abolitionists faced in persuading the nation to take a very real economic and personal risk’.13 Following Stott’s lead, I would argue that several truths coexist at the heart of More’s commitment to abolition, and they can be seen in her poem ‘The Black Slave Trade’.14 First, in the poem a humanitarian impulse appears in More’s initial efforts to make a claim for what the reader shares with the enslaved African: Perish the proud philosophy, which sought To rob them of the pow’rs of equal thought! What! does th’immortal principle within Change with the casual colour of a skin? (p. 375) Indeed, More continues, black Africans also have ‘heads to think, and hearts to feel, / And souls to act, with firm, ‘tho erring zeal’ (p. 375). Paradoxically, while More adheres to a Eurocentric philosophy, according to which Africans do not have access to a western – and superior – code of conduct, she none the less indicts racist ideology for singling out Africans for enslavement based on their skin colour: What wrongs, what injuries does Oppression plead, To smooth the crime and sanctify the deed? What strange offense, what aggravated sin? They stand convicted – of a darker skin! (pp. 379–80) Second, More’s moral position extends to a critique of empire, particularly when it entails the search for gold. And thou, WHITE SAVAGE! whether lust of gold Or lust of conquest in thee uncontroll’d! Hero or robber! – by whatever name Thou plead thy impious claim to wealth or fame; Whether inferior mischiefs be thy boast, A tyrant trader rifling Congo’s coast: Or bolder carnage track thy crimson way.





(pp. 384–95) Yet while she positions herself against the imperial opportunists, More also writes from the point of view of someone who believes herself to be culturally and racially superior to the Africans. Addressing herself to the slavers, she invokes a Christian viewpoint to establish the moral superiority of her stance: Barbarians, hold! th’ opprobious commerce spare, Respect HIS sacred image which they bear. Tho’ dark and savage, ignorant and blind, They claim the common privilege of kind; Let Malice strip them of each other plea, They still are men, and men shou’d still be free. (p. 380) In other words, as the poem unfolds, slavery becomes an occasion for the poet to define herself as someone with enhanced moral vision, an insight she is able to offer as a gift on behalf of the enslaved African. The Africans themselves do not speak directly in the poem. In the one instance of black representation, More borrows from Ramsay’s Treatment of African Slaves (1784) to describe how an enslaved African named Qua-shi committed suicide rather than allowing himself to be punished: ironically, the cost of his noble ‘statement’ is selfdestruction (p. 386). In addition, as with other abolitionist rhetoric, More’s poem often visualises enslaved Africans in terms of their tortured embodiment, as images of the ‘sharp iron’ that ‘wounds’ the utmost soul, of physical deprivations, of ‘th’ oppressor’s rod’ and ‘the captive’s chain’ circulate in her poem. Like other abolitionists, she leaves out what Saidiya Hartman has called the more ‘mundane and quotidian’ qualities of slave life in favour of more sensational aspects of captivity.15 More’s poem further enforces the message of other abolitionist discourse: similar to the Clarkson drawing, which she carried into fashionable drawing rooms, her poem participates in ‘an abolitionist cultural agenda’ which, in the analysis of Marcus Wood, ‘dictated that slaves were to be visualised in a manner which emphasised their total passivity and prioritised their status as helpless victims’.16 As an abolitionist, More speaks for helpless Africans, giving voice to their silent suffering. Although she adopts a humble pose, insisting that, unlike Thomas Southerne, she claims no poetic inspiration in taking a public stance on slavery, she none the less creates herself as a moral persona with authority and weight. She participates



Kings dispossess’d, and provinces thy prey; Whether thou pant to tame earth’s distant bound; All Cortez murder’d, all Columbus found; O’er plundered realms to reign, detested Lord. Make millions wretched, and thyself abhorr’d:–

in an abolitionist tradition that perpetuated the idea that enslaved Africans would be best saved through the intervention of those possessing the agency to ‘give’ them their own liberation.17 In her work on representations of slavery in nineteenth-century America, Hartman suggests that we need to be cautious about the humanitarian gaze that surveys slave’s suffering, only to linger over, and comment on, the tortured body. She asks trenchantly: ‘What does the exposure of the violated body yield? Proof of black sentience or the inhumanity of the “peculiar institution”?’ To Hartman’s query, I would add another: When does a liberal intervention designed to show the utterly dehumanising effects of slavery lead to the representation of dehumanised subjects?18 The issue is further complicated by the fact that a white liberal gaze directed towards an enslaved sufferer, even when it begins with benevolent intentions, can be easily compromised by a fetishistic impulse: from a safe distance, suffering of the enslaved can invoke not only sympathy, but also a more complex series of emotions arising from the deep pleasure of the look, as Hartman proposes. Querying what it means to survey the conditions of enslavement she asks: Does the extension of humanity to the enslaved ironically reinscribe their subjugated status? Do the figurative capacities of blackness enable white flights of fantasy while increasing the likelihood of the captive’s disappearance? Can the moral embrace of pain extricate itself from the pleasures borne by subjection . . .. Is the act of ‘witnessing’ a kind of looking no less entangled with ‘the wielding of power and the extraction of enjoyment’?19 Following the lines of Hartman’s inquiry, we might similarly ask about More’s own relationship to the enslaved Africans whose liberation she chose to champion: for instance, to what extent did More’s witnessing of the suffering of enslaved Africans become entangled with her own wielding of power? Was her ‘moral embrace’ of the slave’s pain able to extricate itself from what Hartman calls the ‘pleasure born by subjection’? These are important questions as we turn back to her satirical analogy. In the terms of her metaphor, women of fashion are similarly being imposed upon in an especially brutal and dehumanising way. They are as oppressed by ‘tyrant fashion’ as the slaves are oppressed by barbaric traders. However, in light of the questions Hartman raises, it now seems relevant to ask whether the metaphor might similarly complicate the issue of women’s agency, as they are similarly placed within a rhetorical structure suggesting the need for an effort on their behalf. I want to be clear that the issue is not simply whether, by means of her analogy, More risks trivialising the historical enslavement of Africans by using it to talk about elite white women who are enthralled by fashion, as some might suggest: indeed, I do have some sympathy for an argument that More’s metaphor, designed to convey an extreme message about the nature of the fashionable world, may well diminish the actual conditions of slavery. In More’s satire, the




hold of the slave ship is no more uncomfortable than an overcrowded drawing room. Being on the auction block proves no more traumatic than a season of social appointments in London. Fashionable dress leaving the body exposed, or fashionable practice dictating a particular diet, tyrannises as effectively as slavery’s brutal regime. The issue is, of course, not just one of degree but also of circumstance: some may find the very terms of the analogy offensive, as slavery stripped human beings of all choice in the matter and led to much more deadly circumstances. But I would argue that the real question here is what it means to compare fashionable women to slaves in the context of a rhetorical tradition that had already rendered enslaved Africans as in need of intervention. As the tenor of More’s metaphor suggests, fashionable women also become passive and mute. Like the enslaved Africans, the salvation of the fashionable lady depends on More’s intervention, her enlightened ability to see human potential in slavery’s victims, despite their current state of subjection. Also like Africans, fashionable women are ‘ignorant’ only by circumstance, until a greater spiritual awakening occurs. This analogy also implies that More’s fashionable women are living in a kind of spiritual darkness, without the agency to make meaningful choices or to reflect on the life that they’ve chosen. As consumers, they are totally passive, ‘enchained’ by what we now might call ‘false consciousness’. They lack the superior vision that More’s Evangelicalism offers, and their liberation depends on their willingness to yield themselves up to her point of view. The idea that a commitment to the fashionable life is a type of spiritual enslavement was, of course, as crucial to an anti-consumerist agenda in the eighteenth century as it is at the beginning of the twenty-first. However, this idea – recently challenged by the work of cultural historians and semioticians alike – is worth revisiting in light of recent archival work suggesting a far more complicated picture of female consumers in the eighteenth century. To take just one relevant example, in The Gentleman’s Daughter, the historian Amanda Vickery begins by identifying the ‘unquestioned belief in the shallow selfishness of female desire [that] has dogged historical discussion for decades’,20 only to contradict convincingly the prevalent view of female consumption in the eighteenth century, especially as it was practised by the middle ranks, as repetitive or predominantly mundane. Though Vickery’s groundbreaking study concentrates on the relationship of eighteenth-century women to their fashionable things, it none the less creates an important paradigm shift for discussing the larger issue of female relationship to fashionable practices – the very practices More descries – as well. Working with archival materials from one middle-rank eighteenth-century woman, Elizabeth Shackleton, Vickery is able to reconstruct a portrait of a female consumer who was much more invested, actively and creatively, in a range of consumer behaviours. Quite simply, fashionable practice was not simply imposed on the unthinking Shackleton. Instead, for Shackleton and women like her, ‘Engagement with fashion involved complicated, decision-making’




(p. 178). For Shackleton, being au courant on fashion was a matter of pride, a means of keeping up with the news elsewhere (p. 172). In addition, ‘the exchange of information “in the fashion way” had wider implications for feminine culture’, as it allowed women ‘to share doubts, advice, and experience’. According to Vickery’s research, female possessions ‘were key props in inconspicuous ceremonies, but they also demonstrated polite conformity and were easy targets for social criticism’ (p. 183). Furthermore, goods expressed proper ceremony (p. 186). They were also a significant part of the currency of the mistress-servant relationship (p. 184). To read More’s satire against Vickery’s research is not simply to flesh out the fashionable lady who is the tenor of her ironic metaphor. Nor is it simply to deflect her criticism on the grounds that ‘real women weren’t like that’. Rather, I am suggesting that Shackleton’s example ought to provoke questions concerning the faceless female participants in fashionable life, the object of More’s attack. For example, how did women themselves feel about the social rituals and events that structured their lives? What opportunities for selfexpression might they have found in an obligatory social calendar? Were the women who willingly made the rounds of the card parties, balls and social events mindless individuals on whom social prescriptions and fashionable practices were cruelly imposed? Or were they thoughtful in their apparent conformity, careful, perhaps, to choose their occasions and to make use of the time in order to advance a particular purpose? Were they, like Shackleton, keenly aware of the role of fashion, whether of behaviour or dress, in a wider range of signifying practices? In other words, moving from the historian’s archival recovery to More’s satire illuminates the entire rhetorical strategy that frames her argument. Such a movement further allows us to resist the notion that human beings in general – and women in particular – were passive, unresisting and mute in the face of larger consumer movements. At this point my argument may seem to overlook an obvious objection: isn’t there, in fact, something masochistic about fashion? Could it be that More is on to something – that fashion has the potential to brutalise and dehumanise just as slavery does? No one who has worked on the topic of fashion could deny this fact. However if, as Hartman suggests, gazing at the suffering of enslaved Africans and making that distress the subject of one’s intervention is entangled in a fetishistic relationship to the suffering body, so too is More’s take on the fashionable world. Though More is obviously being ironic, her moral embrace of the ‘pain’ and suffering of fashionable women suggests that something more is going on – that fashionable women are being appropriated in a complicated manoeuvre entailing, in Hartman’s words, ‘the wielding of power and the extraction of enjoyment’. In other words, by resorting to an abolitionist rhetoric in order to accomplish her satirical end, More inevitably implicated herself in a representational tradition where human suffering had already served as an opportunity for projection and identification. Thus two purposes are accomplished simultaneously through More’s satire: first, she mocks the




fashionable female participants of her society, exhorting them to ‘improve’ themselves, to resist existing social practices and implicitly to find meaningful lives in world that lies beyond the public sphere, Second, however, More’s rhetoric effectively forecloses discussion about the role of material culture in the construction of female subjectivity. Before concluding, I want to pause briefly over the other rhetorical strategy that informs More’s essay and similarly compromises its pro-female message: the personification of Fashion as ‘the llama of Thibet’. Joyce Zonana has called this kind of rhetoric ‘feminist orientalism’, and she has articulated its scope and its political effect: From Mary Wollstonecraft to Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Margaret Fuller to Florence Nightingale, one discovers writer after writer turning to images of oriental life – specifically the ‘Mohamatan’ or Arabian harem – in order to articulate their critique of the life of women in the West . . . the function of these images is not primarily to secure Western domination over the East . . . Rather by figuring objectionable aspects of life in the West as ‘eastern’, these western feminist writers rhetorically define their project as the removal of Eastern elements from Western life.21 Thus, in Zonana’s terms, More’s personification allows her to make the case that fashion ought to be extirpated: the sense is that fashion has no place in the western tradition, and women are better off protected from its influences. Yet if fashion is alien, it cannot be a meaningful part of the construction of western female subjectivity: it can neither be an impulse towards self-expression nor a meaningful way to interact with others (as it appears to have been for Elizabeth Shackleton, for example). A tyrant, as oppressor, as alien Other, fashion is a force from which women must be liberated. In sum, I have been arguing that Hannah More’s satire raises the important question of how female subjectivity is best understood in relation to consumerist practices. More’s satire implicitly argues that women are ‘deep’, or most spiritually alive, when they withdraw from a world of fashionable practices and seek to define themselves within the realm of the private sphere, the family and the home. This is a point she would make frequently over the course of her long career – in Strictures on a System of Modern Female Education, for example. No doubt this is a position worth taking seriously, and it has been defended by feminist scholars who are able to find agency in the range of duties and responsibilities given to wives and mothers. But in her satirical essay, More makes her statement on women’s subjectivity by deploying troubling rhetorical strategies that raise questions concerning the appropriation of enslaved Africans; the author’s own investments in another’s perceived suffering; and the most efficacious understanding of female subjectivity. In opposition to More’s construction of female subjectivity, I have been arguing that we might do better to take our cue from cultural historians who demonstrate




that there is no such thing as ‘deep’ human subjectivity outside the world of consumerist practices: women do not exist now, nor did they then ‘outside of’ or beyond consumerist practice, and fashion is not something from which one can – or even necessarily should be – liberated.22 To the contrary, it is through engagement with fashion that women can announce themselves, make meaningful choices and define themselves as subjects in a kingdom of their own design.

Notes 1 This is according to Robert Hole, who edited the version of the essay I am using here: Selected Writings of Hannah More (London: William Pickering, 1996), p. xlvii. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 2 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slaves in England and America (New York: Routledge, 2000) and Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 3 Of this essay Anne Stott writes, More ‘was part of the new Puritanism steadily gaining ground in the wake of the French Revolution, which urged women to turn their backs on the allurements of the ball and the pleasure garden and to find their vocations in the duties of the home and the expanding world of philanthropy’. Stott argues that this ‘was an invitation not for seclusion or confinement but for a different type of public activity’. Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 260. 4 The clearest illustration of this position is found in two essays by Mitzi Myers, ‘Hannah More’s Tracts for the Times: Social Fiction and Female Ideology’, in Fetter’d or Free? British Women Novelists, 1660–1815, ed. Mary Anne Schofield and Cecilia Macheski (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 1986), pp. 264–84 and ‘Reform or Ruin: ‘A Revolution in Female Manners’, Studies in Eighteenth-century Culture, 11 (1986): 199–216. See also Patricia Demers, who describes More as a ‘meliorist’, someone ‘who believed passionately, forthrightly in the curative powers of education as an antidote to both the immorality of the upper ranks and the feckless improvidence of the lower orders’. The World of Hannah More (Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press, 1996), p. 14. Anne K. Mellor similarly defends More in Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 13–38. See also Jane Nardin, ‘Hannah More and the Rhetoric of Educational Reform’ Women’s History Review, 10 (2001): 211–17. 5 In addition to my Their Fathers’ Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth, and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), see Moira Ferguson, Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: Nation, Class, and Gender (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995); and Donna Landry, The Muses of Resistance: Labouring-class Women’s Poetry in Britain, 1739–1796 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Mellor charges that those emerging from ‘a theoretical tradition grounded on Marxist or left-wing socialist ideologies’ ‘hate Hannah More because in their eyes she did far too much to stop a liberating French-style political revolution from occurring in England’ (p. 15, emphasis in the original).




6 Stott, pp. 89, 87. 7 Mary G. Jones, Hannah More (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), p. 82. According to Jones, it was Mrs Middleton who convinced Ramsay to publish Essay on Treatment of Slaves in 1782. She subsequently supported its publication and rallied against the attacks it engendered in press 1784–5 (p. 82). According to Jones, More’s letters from after the period she met the Middletons ‘describe some of the unremembered preliminary efforts to launch one of the earliest propaganda campaigns for social reform in English history’ (p. 83). 8 Jones, p. 84. 9 Stott, p. 90. Like others during her time, More also wanted Southerne’s comic subplot concerning the fate of two unmarried sisters – his original invention – removed from the play on the grounds that it was too vulgar. She hoped that Richard Brinsley Sheridan would take up the challenge. 10 Jones, p. 84. See also Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: the British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 32. 11 Jones, p. 84. 12 Stott, p. 94. 13 Stott, p. 94. 14 Hannah More, ‘The Black Slave Trade’, in Poems, with a New Introduction by Caroline Franklin (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1996), pp. 371–90. Further references are cited parenthetically. 15 Hartman, p. 6. 16 Wood, p. 19. 17 This situation is well illustrated, represented by the beginning of David Dabydeen’s novel A Harlot’s Progress ((London: Jonathan Cape, 1999), in which the elderly black character Mungo struggles to tell the abolitionist Pringle what he wants to hear, knowing that a warm blanket will be the reward for ‘his’ story – a story that he does not in fact remember and which fail to cohere into narrative. 18 For further discussion of this point, see my The British Slave Trade and Public Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), especially chapter 1. 19 Hartman, p. 22. 20 Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998) p. 162. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. Vickery’s position belongs to a wider body of work on consumption in the eighteenth century, work that is best seen in the large body of essays collected in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (New York: Routledge, 1993). 21 Joyce Zonana, ‘The Sultana and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre’, Signs, 18:8 (1993): 594. 22 My thinking on this subject is indebted to Deidre Lynch’s The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Meaning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). Chapter 4, ‘Agoraphobia and Interiority in Frances Burney’s Fiction’, is especially suggestive for its argument demonstrating how ‘a consumer culture is a psychological culture’ (p. 182).








Part IV Women and Books





10 Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’

[P]ray be only dress’d as you are; for, as they know your Condition, and I have told them the Story of your present Dress, and how you came by it, one of the young Ladies begs it as a Favour, that they may see you just as you are: And I am the rather pleas’d it should be so, because they will perceive you owe nothing to Dress, and make a much better Figure with your own native Stock of Loveliness, than the greatest Ladies do in the most splendid Attire . . . Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740)1 In the above quotation, part of the long build-up to the marriage of Pamela Andrews and Mr B., Richardson’s heroine is commanded to appear before her future husband’s guests in the homespun costume she originally created to fend off his advances. Where B. once interpreted the ‘Story’ of Pamela’s ‘Dress’ as one of hypocrisy and rebellion, he now reads it as a tale of virtuous sentiment. Thus re-imagined, Pamela’s humble attire defies those who would condemn her as an ambitious upstart and proves her more than equal, in B.’s eyes at least, to the ‘greatest Ladies’ of society. But this is not the whole ‘Story’ of Pamela’s dress. The centrality of clothing to Richardson’s novel has long been noted. Not only does the heroine’s inheritance of her deceased mistress’s ‘Suit . . . of Cloaths’ advance the novel’s seduction plot (p. 18), but Pamela’s costume also enjoys a privileged status as a signifier of the virtue for she which she will be rewarded. Throughout the novel, dress and text appear as metaphorical equivalents – a connection forcefully established when we learn that the heroine has tacked her correspondence to her under-petticoat.2 However, the meaning of these sartorial and written texts is profoundly unstable: as B.’s revised reading of Pamela’s homespun gown suggests, this is a novel in which fabrication and truth demand constant re-evaluation. It is, therefore, unsurprising that critics were less unanimous in their understanding of Richardson’s heroine and the material evidence she offered in 163



Jennie Batchelor

defence of her virtue. For sympathetic readers such as Aaron Hill, the servant’s homespun gown symbolised the purity of its wearer’s intent as well as that of her author: Pamela ‘reconciled the Pleasing to the Proper. The Thought is everywhere exactly cloath’d by the Expression: And becomes its Dress as roundly, and as close, as Pamela her Country-Habit.’3 But where Hill would present the heroine’s servile dress as a symbol of the novel’s ideal marriage of (narrative) form and (moral) content, more cynical readers would turn the sartorial metaphor against the work. The anonymous author of the lubricious Pamela Censured (1741), for example, argued that Pamela adopted her rustic garb only to provoke B. to remove it: ‘no young Gentleman who reads this, but wishes himself in Mrs. Jervis’s Place to turn Pamela about and examine all her Dress to her under Petticoat’.4 Peeping under Pamela’s dress would not only reveal the truth of the servant’s character, the author suggests, but that of the novel that bore her name. Instead of Hill’s perfectly adorned moral tale, here we have Pamela as pornography in masquerade. Read in the context of early Pamela criticism, B.’s remarks seem little less than prophetic. His use of the term ‘Story’ in a text in which narratives and plots famously generate suspicion and multiple readings suggests the instability of the material signs of the heroine’s virtue and thus anticipates the critical debates in which Hill and the author of Pamela Censured would participate. Pamela may have created her homespun costume in order to define her ‘own self ’ (p. 56), but once this sartorial text became a disembodied ‘Story’, she would lose control of its meaning as surely as Richardson did that of the novel. Once divorced from the (authorial) body that produced it, the ‘Story’ of Pamela’s dress could be refashioned in narratives in which neither she nor her author had a voice.

The ‘Pamela Vogue’ Since Pamela’s publication, a number of phrases have been deployed to encompass the many texts (written, visual and material) it inspired. By far the most enduring is the ‘Pamela Vogue’, a term drawn from Allan McKillop’s Samuel Richardson: Printer and Novelist (1936). This once widely used phrase economically points to the interdependence of the fashion and literary marketplaces in the period and to Richardson’s keenness to exploit this connection.5 Like the entrepreneurial shopkeepers, tailors and milliners Neil McKendrick places at the vanguard of modernity in his account of the commercialisation of fashion,6 Richardson created a market for his literary product by placing adverts in a leading newspaper and by prefacing Pamela with admiring puffs that presaged its success. But if, as McKillop’s phrase implies, fashion’s logic of supply and demand serves as a useful model for understanding the various methods Richardson developed to sell Pamela, it also elucidates the remarkable events that followed its publication. As a voguish object, the novel was widely imitated and derided; like a new style of gown, its impact was felt more widely with every passing month. What was once the accessory of choice for



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the fashionable crowd at Ranelagh – who carried copies of the novel while strolling around the Gardens7 – became a phenomenon in rural communities such as Slough, where locals flocked to hear the smithy read Pamela and rang church bells in celebration of the heroine’s marriage.8 But while the novel’s movement from fashionable urban centres to the provinces was as predicable as fashion’s progress, the meanings generated by its circulation were not. In addition to spawning spin-offs, parodies, sequels, comedies and operas, the novel inspired a host of engravings and paintings, as well as two sets of waxworks, a set of playing cards, a tea service and a Pamela fan, each of which invented the novel anew. Although the ‘Pamela Vogue’ neatly signals both the centrality of material culture to Richardson’s novel itself and the text’s status as fashionable commodity, several scholars have tried to exorcise the term from Richardson scholarship. William B. Warner, for example, has suggested that the ‘Pamela Vogue’ underplays the novel’s impact on eighteenth-century print culture and offers the curiously anachronistic ‘media event’ instead.9 Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, on the other hand, have asserted that ‘ “controversy” . . . more clearly registers the extent to which critics have seen writers on Pamela as playing, with different degrees of knowingness, for serious ideological stakes’.10 These studies offer a welcome corrective to those critical accounts that have attempted, in the words of James Grantham Turner, ‘to separate the original text from the discourses and artefacts it provoked’.11 Keymer and Sabor’s work, in particular, has made it impossible to read the novel independently of its multiple afterlives. None the less, the re-branding of the ‘Pamela Vogue’ runs the risk of seeming to privilege the textual over the material, a fact that has serious implications for the study of the fascinating objects inspired by the novel and with which the following section of this essay is concerned. Warner’s suggestion that an emphasis on the material and the popular detracts from the text’s ideological significance is particularly misleading. Such an approach obscures the extent to which fashion, consumption and the material are central to Pamela’s ideological project and the ensuing Pamela debates.12 This essay examines two artefacts – the Pamela fan and the object-narrator novel, a genre which might profitably be viewed as the offspring of the Pamela phenomenon – in a bid to reinstate the ‘Pamela Vogue’. An exploration of these artefacts reveals just some of the many ways in which this evocative phrase speaks to the central concerns of Richardson’s novel and the controversy it engendered.

The Pamela fan Accounts of Pamela have emphasised the heroine’s determination to fashion herself through dress and dressmaking. Tassie Gwilliam, for example, has read Pamela’s rebellious adoption of her servile costume as an attempt to block B.’s designs by ‘defin[ing] her clothing’s use rather than being defined by it’.13 Detecting a still more wilful Pamela, Sheila C. Conboy and Patricia Brückmann have similarly suggested that the servant deploys her dressmaking skills and



Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’

strategically displays her awareness of ‘the critical materials and signs of costume’ in order to break down the barriers between herself and B.14 However, as I have suggested elsewhere, the hostile and unanticipated readings the heroine’s dress provoked give the lie to Pamela’s efforts to define herself through costume, raising, in the process, important questions about the relationship between subjectivity and materiality.15 Such questions would undoubtedly have had a bearing on the status of Pamela merchandise and determined views on its consumption. The Pamela fan is a case in point. In many ways, the fan is the most appropriate of the Pamela artefacts: as a much-contested fashionable accessory, it not only opened up the same debates about the relationship between consumer and commodity that the novel itself sparked, but as Stephanie Fysh has pointed out, it would also have resembled the novel that inspired it: like the novel, the fan was small and portable, and told its story on a series of printed leaves.16 Since no Pamela fan is known to exist, work on this object must remain partly conjectural; none the less, the available evidence suggests that its owners may have shared their heroine’s frustration in their inability to manipulate ‘the critical and material signs of costume’. Information on the fan’s appearance can be gleaned from an advertisement that appeared in the Daily Advertiser on 28 April 1741. The fan was sold by Mrs Gamble, a well-known fan-maker, and marketed to appeal ‘to the Ladies, more especially [to] those who have the Book, PAMELA’. It boasted illustrations of the ‘principal Adventures of [the heroine’s Life], in Servitude, Love, and Marriage. Design’d and engraven by the best Masters’, as well as a short poem: Virtue’s Reward you in this Fan may view, To Honour’s Tie, Pamela strictly true; But when by conjugal Affection mov’d, A Pattern to her Sex, and Age, she prov’d. In ev’ry amiable Scene of Life, Beneficent, fond Parent, loving Wife.17 Until recently, such artefacts have been seen as inferior imitations of Richardson’s original or cynical attempts to cash in on its popularity, rather than as critical texts in their own right. As Terri Nickel comments, ‘Pamela’s accommodation to its age, in effect its very popularity, discomforts its critics’ who have treated the Pamela industry as ‘a “curiosity” belonging to the scholarly (not critical) area classified as “Richardsonia” ’.18 But as the poem cited above makes clear, the Pamela fan was much more than a ‘curiosity’ or even an illustrated synopsis of Richardson’s text: not only did it apparently provide a sympathetic reading of Pamela’s character, but it could also have allowed its purchasers to demonstrate their acceptance of that reading and to identify themselves with Richardson’s heroine. According to Fysh, the Gamble fan would have functioned as ‘a sign of the virtue of the fan’s holder’, who was ‘herself asked by




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the advertiser to turn it back on herself, and view “Virtue’s Reward” ’ in the fashionable object she had purchased.19 Yet the fan’s relationship to its owner’s character may well have been more problematic than Fysh allows. Fans were contentious fashion accessories in the early eighteenth century, as innumerable satires indicate. To quote Spectator 102 (Wednesday, 27 June 1711), ‘a Fan is either a Prude, or a Coquet’ – a sign of false modesty or a symbol of feigned innocence.20 Pamela itself acknowledges something of this cultural ambiguity, an ambiguity that belies Fysh’s reading of the Pamela fan as a stable sign of its owner’s virtue. When the newly married Pamela is forced to entertain Lady Davers, for example, she uses her fan, much as she had earlier used her homespun costume, to resist those who would misread her: ‘I was so vex’d, I bit a Piece of my Fan out, not knowing what I did; but still I said nothing, and did nothing but flutter it, and fan myself’ (p. 388). The fan, which substitutes for Pamela’s speech here, becomes an emblem of the former servant’s virtue: by allowing her to conceal her anger and discomfort, it prevents the heroine from offending her sister-in-law. Earlier in the novel, however, Pamela’s fan speaks out against her when she abandons her homespun costume and adopts the guise of a gentlewoman once more: I put on fine Linen, silk Shoes, and fine white Cotton Stockens, a fine quilted Coat, a delicate green mantua silk Gown and Coat; a French Necklace, and a lac’d Head, and Handkerchief, and clean Gloves; and taking my Fan in my Hand, I, like a little proud Hussy, looked in the Glass, and thought myself a Gentlewoman once more . . . (pp. 302–3) This episode, which recalls Pamela’s earlier ‘trick[ing] up’ (p. 55) in her homespun gown, was precisely the kind that anti-Pamelists seized on with such relish. For these critics, Pamela’s coquettish fan spoke out against her character as surely as her self-definition as a ‘little proud Hussy’, a point humorously made, as Keymer and Sabor have suggested, by Henry Fielding’s decision to lodge Shamela’s decidedly immoral mother at ‘the Fan and Pepper-Box in Drury-Lane’.21 Unfortunately, there is scant information on which scenes were recreated on the fan, although a contributor to the 1804 Critical Review recollects that they were ‘striking’.22 A letter dated 13 September 1741 from Elizabeth Postlethwaite to her sister Barbara Kerrich, and recently discovered by Keymer and Sabor, offers the only known source of information on the fan’s illustrations. In September 1741 Postlethwaite sent her Pamela fan as a present to her sister, noting that she wished the fan’s illustrators had made ‘Pamela look better when she is out at the window’. She was more approving of the representation of ‘Mother Jewkes’: ‘she looks like what she is, she has a fine broad face’.23 The nature and number of the other images on the fan – Postlethwaite describes only one and, according to the advertisement, there must have been at least




another two – remain unknown.24 However, there is no reason to assume that Gamble’s fan was less likely to depict some of the novel’s more contentious scenes than artists and engravers were, as an anonymous poetic satire, The Fan (1749) suggests. Like the Spectator essay before it, this reworking of The Rape of the Lock (1714) professed a desire to disarm coquettes who brandished their fans, as did ‘heroes [their] swords’. The particular fan in question belongs to the fifteen-year-old Lydia, and displays a series of sentimental and more lubricious scenes from Tom Jones (1749), including Molly Seagrim in her bedchamber and Sophia losing her muff. This rare satire on an early form of literary merchandise offers intriguing insights into how the Pamela fan might have been read by contemporaries. Throughout the poem, Lydia’s fan is presented as a sex-toy that stimulates the desires of admirers and allows her to satisfy her own should her lovers fail to: ‘She courts its aid, she courts its gentle breeze, / To quench th’ internal fires, and give her ease’. In a conventional formulation, The Fan associates Lydia’s libidinous appetites with her consumption of fashionable goods and her voracious reading habits: ‘She lov’d the toy, because she lov’d the tale’.25 Reading is presented in The Fan as a masturbatory activity for which Lydia will be devastatingly punished. The god Zephyr, driven by jealousy, steals the fan in a mock rape scene, which leaves Lydia bereft on the Norwich assembly-room floor. Although we might recoil from the misogyny that underpins The Fan and the Spectator essay, these texts none the less invite readings of the Pamela fan which challenge Fysh’s account. At the very least, such satires suggest, as Keymer and Sabor point out, that ‘[w]ith its illustration of a highly charged seduction narrative, and its declaration of the bearer as a paid-up fashion victim, the fan may well have lent itself to more coquettish uses’.26 While acknowledging the (appealing) truth of Keymer and Sabor’s claim, there is, I would suggest, a more salutary lesson to be gleaned from these texts. The crucial point is not that women might have deployed the Pamela fan in ways that would have made Richardson’s heroine blush, but that their ability to define its use was necessarily limited. If Lydia’s fan could be read as a sign of sexual availability and Pamela’s homespun costume and letters as evidence of duplicity, then how certain could the fan’s owner be that her deployment of this accoutrement would be interpreted as intended? The observer’s view of Richardson’s novel, the way in which the fan was held and the venue in which it was displayed, would have informed readings of this fashionable object and the woman who carried it as surely as the images it displayed. Understood as a both symbol of female modesty and the weapon of choice of the coquette, the meaning of the Pamela fan would have been ambiguous, and at least as far beyond its owner’s control as Pamela proved to be beyond its author’s. It is precisely the fan’s uncertainty – its failure to resolve the Pamela/Shamela debate by proving Richardson’s heroine to be a virtuous prude or vicious coquette – that makes the Pamela fan such an important artefact. With breathtaking economy, it acknowledges Richardson’s success in establishing the novel




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as a fashionable commodity, the centrality of the material to the literary and ideological projects to which he laid claim and the precariousness of the novel’s strategy of linking the material and the moral. That the owner of this fashionable accessory potentially had as little control over the meaning of her fan as Pamela did over her homespun clothes or Richardson over his novel, indicates that the Pamela fan was not simply an attempt to cash in on the ‘Pamela Vogue’, but an early and incisive commentary on it.

Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat (1751): Pamela as object-narrator novel The Pamela fan raises important questions about the relationship between subject and object: the extent to which individuals were liberated or colonised by the commodities through which they sought to define themselves. It also raises wider issues about the status of literature in a culture in which books not only inspired, but were also frequently viewed as, fashionable commodities. That the commodification of Pamela was anticipated is made clear in a letter by the French translator Jean Baptiste de Freval, which was prefixed to the first edition of the novel: Little Book, charming PAMELA! face the World, and never doubt of finding Friends and Admirers, not only in thine own Country, but far from Home; where thou mayst give an Example of Purity to the Writers of a neighbouring Nation; which now shall have an Opportunity to receive English Bullion in Exchange for its own Dross, which has so long passed current among us in Pieces abounding with all the Levities of its volatile Inhabitants. (p. 6) De Freval’s letter positions Pamela in a complex relationship to contemporary debates on the commercialisation and expansion of the literary marketplace. It proclaims the novel’s publication to be a turning point in the history of print culture: Pamela will cleanse the novel of its impurities and reconstitute the common ‘Dross’ of contemporary fiction as ‘English Bullion’. However, the economic language through which de Freval champions Pamela threatens to devalue its currency: English bullion may be weightier, and hence more valuable, than foreign dross, but both are tradable commodities none the less. Richardson’s novel’s efforts to raise the stakes of textual production might have resisted the threat of commodification caused by the growth and commercialisation of the literary marketplace, but even his most enthusiastic admirers, it seems, would not claim that his work could escape it.27 The many and varied effects of the commercialisation of eighteenth-century print culture to which de Freval gestures here have been well documented in recent scholarship.28 In one of the most compelling of these studies, and one that has significant implications for the study of Pamela, Deidre Lynch has




examined how these developments affected methods and understandings of characterisation. Arguing that it was not until the Romantic period that novelists succeeded in persuading readers to conceive of heroes and heroines ‘as beings who take on lives of their own’, Lynch urges a new ‘pragmatics of character’ that looks beyond the conventional labels of round and flat, to recognise the materialism – characters as ‘reading matter’ in the broadest sense of the term – that informs novels published before the 1760s. The Pamela phenomenon is presented as the exception that proves the rule of the ‘economy of character’ in early eighteenth-century literature. For every reader who enjoyed ‘an intense personal involvement’ with Richardson’s heroine, Lynch argues, there were many others ‘who did not complain about the “flatness” of the characters on offer at the booksellers’ – who read narratives whose protagonists were talking coins and bank notes (flat by definition) just as avidly as they read Pamela’.29 The ‘narratives’ alluded to here include object-narrator novels, a genre that, as we shall see, combined bawdy tales of seduction, told from the point of view of coins, banknotes and various fashionable accessories, with witty, metafictional commentary on the effects on the commercialisation of eighteenthcentury sartorial and literary culture. Rather than place Richardson’s novel in this context, Lynch seeks to position Pamela at a crucial moment in the history of the rise of the novel, a moment when fiction turned away – if only briefly – from the ‘materialist’ concepts of character she outlines and looked forward to the fully-fledged subjectivities imagined in the Romantic novel. Yet the early reception of Pamela suggests that Richardson’s novel was perceived to have had at least as much in common with the narrative forms from which Lynch would dissociate it than not. For all their access to the heroine’s thoughts and sentiments, those readers of a more sceptical turn of mind found it hard to accept Pamela Andrews’ integrity as a fictional subject. The piece of ‘English Bullion’ described by de Freval appeared to many to be little more than an already debased commodity; Pamela seemed to have been almost entirely taken over by the objects through which she would represent herself. Shamela represents only the most famous example of this kind of reading. The parody’s title is not only an attack on the deceitfulness of a writer who sought to pass off a titillating tale as a sentimental novel; it is also a satirical comment on the extent to which Pamela was thought to be exposed by the very objects through which she sought to demonstrate her virtue. A ‘sham’ – one of Fielding’s heroine’s few possessions – was a set of false sleeves used to dress up soiled or plain clothing.30 Conflating character with costume, Shamela’s name suggests both Fielding’s recognition of the inextricability of the moral and the material in Richardson’s work and the parodist’s understanding of Pamela as a commodity, which might be reworked and resold by the enterprising, the opportunistic or the unscrupulous. Read in the context of the object-narrator novels that emerged in the first decade of the eighteenth century, but which would flourish only in the wake of the Pamela phenomenon,




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another tantalising possibility emerges. If critics of Richardson’s novel insisted that Pamela’s dress spoke out against her, then Fielding’s sartorial pun took their arguments to the next logical step. Instead of simply rewriting the ‘Story’ of Pamela’s ‘Dress’, as the author of Pamela Censured would attempt, Fielding invited readers to imagine how that narrative might be rewritten if only her clothes could tell us what had really happened behind closed doors. Object-narrator novels, also known as it-narratives or novels of circulation, seem to have taken Fielding’s cue, by rereading conventional courtship and seduction plots from the viewpoint of ceaselessly circulating waistcoats, petticoats and corkscrews. Traditionally viewed – like Pamela merchandise – as ephemera, these texts are now enjoying a new critical prominence in a range of studies that seek to reassess their cultural and literary significance. The proliferation of object-narrator novels from the mid-century onwards has been explained by critics as a response to the birth of the consumer society.31 Aileen Douglas, for example, has observed that no other contemporary genre was ‘more thoroughly determined by’ or willing ‘to exploit’ the logic of consumerism’ than the object-narrator novel.32 But a more specific occasion for the emergence of the genre was the commercialisation of the literary marketplace itself. It-narratives expressed a range of concerns about authorship and textual production, as Christopher Flint has argued. The life of the eternally circulating object-narrator provided writers, he suggests, with an opportunity to express in a playful manner rather more serious concerns that the marketplace ‘invest[ed] writers with a professional identity only at the expense of authorial erasure’.33 The ‘disjunction’ between authorial body and narrating object upon which the it-narrative depended, Flint continues, spoke to fears about ‘the alienated nature of literary property and of the writer’s status in an overpopulated culture’34 – fears which intensified in the wake of Pamela’s publication. Despite their eccentricity, object-narrator novels were as deeply preoccupied with the relationship between subject and object, author and text as were Richardson’s first critics. Indeed, the typical it-narrative plot seems almost to recreate – perhaps even to satirise – the 1740s Pamela debates in which the heroine’s body was traded by writers, artists, fan-makers and wax-modellers. The striking similarities between the story of the ‘Pamela Vogue’ and the conventional plot of the object-narrator novel can be illuminated by a short reading of Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat . . . In Which is Introduced, The Episode of a Petticoat (published in two parts in 1751). Although Memoirs was published after the ‘Pamela Vogue’ had reached its height, it is none the less tempting to read a double allusion to Richardson’s novel in the novella’s title: Pamela’s embroidering of her master’s waistcoat prolongs her stay in B. Hall, while the heroine’s petticoat, the garment with which she fakes her suicide and which occasioned so much prurient excitement in Pamela Censured, featured heavily in early criticism of the novel. These allusions multiply as the text progresses. The it-narrative opens with its ‘author’




explaining the circumstances in which he became acquainted with the story that follows. Following the successful publication of a pamphlet, the usually straitened author-narrator finds himself ‘unusually disposed to Gaiety’ and company.35 Before he can embark on his new life, however, the writer must first retrieve his ‘Suit and Wig’ (I, p. 2) from a pawnbroker’s shop. Here, he sees an embroidered waistcoat, ‘which had still the Remains of that transcendent Lustre, which once had procured it so many admirers’ (I, p. 3). While the author bargains with the broker to purchase the garment, the waistcoat interjects and begins to relate its eventful journey from high-life to pawnshop shelf. The garment begins life in the possession of an irredeemable rake with whose efforts to steal ‘the Virginity from upwards of thirty good-natured Girls’ the waistcoat is gladly complicit (I, pp. 5–6). Its aristocratic adventures are brought to an abrupt end, however, when this once splendid article of dress is rendered ‘unfit’ for its master’s ‘Service’ after being torn in its ‘conspicuous Parts’ in a duel (p. 8). The rest of the narrative follows the waistcoat’s descent into the murky world of the brothel and, that icon of literary prostitution, Grub-Street. The waistcoat’s most recent of many owners is ‘a writer in the Six-clerk-office’ and would-be literary critic called Strutt, who uses its charms to ‘ease’ a maid ‘of her Virginity’. Rather predictably, given the it-narrative’s conviction that virtue – like everything else – can be bought, sold and resold, Miss Hiphop’s virginity has already ‘been given before’ to a ‘whining Theatrical Templar’ whose story was introduced in part I (II, p. 4). As Strutt embarks on his amorous adventures with Miss Hiphop, the waistcoat contracts an ‘intimate Acquaintance with a very communicative Petticoat’ (II, p. 5). Like the waistcoat’s, the petticoat’s is a story of sexual promiscuity and downward mobility. Although the petticoat’s proximity to its ladies’ bodies has furnished her with a wealth of ‘Secret Stor[ies]’ (II, p. 8), she must now be content to relate these tales from the confines of a maid’s wardrobe, rather than that of a Lady. The prattling garments’ fall from grace parodies Pamela’s rise to aristocratic marriage, yet their demise and the servant girl’s ascent originate in the same, much debated practice of casting off or bequeathing second-hand clothes, particularly to servants.36 That this variation on the opening of Pamela was a common trope in it-narratives is unsurprising: not only did it serve as a useful structural device, but it also allowed writers to explore those wider issues surrounding the effects of consumerism – its impact on the social order, the corrupting power of luxury goods in the wrong hands, for example – which were occupying the columns of contemporary periodicals. More importantly, and rather aptly given the fate of Richardson’s novel, it provided a metaphor for the commodification of literature in an expanding and increasingly derivative market. Even Memoirs itself, like the waistcoat the narrator bargains for, is presented as a second-hand offering. The author’s allusions to earlier titles – ‘The Adventures of a Tye-Wig’ (I, p. 3) and a tale of an ‘unfortunate Goose-quill’ (I, p. 4) – remind the reader that the it-narrative was as much a cynical product of the commercialisation of the literary marketplace as it was a satire on it.37




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But the narrative’s gleeful exploitation of the current fashion for such books cannot obscure entirely an underlying disquiet about the implications of this trend for authors, texts and their readers. The comic yet violent account of the psychic damage occasioned by the waistcoat’s separation from the body it formerly adorned articulates precisely the sense of authorial alienation that Flint identifies as one of the it-narrative’s leading concerns. Once severed from its original owner/author, the commodity could be passed on, torn apart and remade in ways that destroyed its once ‘transcendent Lustre’. The resemblance between Pamela’s/Pamela’s fate and that of the endlessly refashioned object-narrator is not only striking, but also instructive. It speaks, for example, to the close connections between the fashion, the commercial and the literary marketplaces in the period – connections that Pamela, like the once voguish it-narrative, would exploit and fall victim to. The novel’s afterlife, in which the heroine’s story was traded back and forth by writers and artists, would only have justified further the object-narrator novel’s concerns about the commercialisation of the literary marketplace and the alienability of literary property. It moreover signals the precarious nature of Richardson’s effort to create a female subject whose virtue was communicated through her rejection, creation and manipulation of fashionable objects, from her Lady’s ‘Suit’ to her homespun gown and fan. Early Pamela criticism’s identification of the heroine with the sartorial objects in which she adorned herself – the heroine does not define her clothes in these texts, they define her – demonstrates concerted resistance to the idea that women might control their self-presentation through dress. Like Lydia in The Fan, and the author-figures in it-narratives, forced to give over their texts to waistcoats and petticoats, Richardson’s heroine is colonised by the objects through which she would assert herself; the ‘Story’ of Pamela’s ‘Dress’ is beyond her or her author’s power to relate. This necessarily brief account of just some of the myriad ‘discourses and artefacts’ Pamela generated – from anti-Pamelist criticism to fans and objectnarrator novels – urges a reconsideration of the validity of the ‘Pamela Vogue’. Not only does this phrase convey the strikingly persistent materiality of the novel in eighteenth-century literary, visual and material culture, but it also signals the extent to which the controversy Pamela produced was intimately bound up with contemporary debates about the relationship between the material and the moral, the female subject and the object world she defined and was defined by. To label this complex phenomenon as such is not to downplay the undeniably ‘serious’ stakes for which the novel’s commentators were playing; on the contrary, it is to acknowledge the serious questions Pamela raised about the impact of sartorial and literary fashions in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Acknowledgement I am very grateful to Kate Williams for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay.





1 Samuel Richardson, Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 272. Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. 2 See Carey McIntosh, ‘Pamela’s Clothes’, ELH, 35 (1968): 75–83; Caryn Chaden, ‘Pamela’s Identity Sewn in Clothes’, in Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts, ed. Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch (New York, West Point, CT and London: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 110–18; Tassie Gwilliam, Samuel Richardson’s Fictions of Gender (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 15; Patricia Brückmann, ‘Clothes of Pamela’s Own: Shopping at B-Hall’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25: 2 (2001): 201–15; and Jennie Batchelor, Dress, Distress and Desire: Clothing and the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 19–51. 3 Reprinted in The Pamela Controversy: Criticisms and Adaptations of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, 1740–1750, ed. Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, 6 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), I, pp. 22–3. 4 [Anon.], Pamela Censured, reprinted in The Pamela Controversy, II, p. 50. 5 On Richardson’s use of new advertising and marketing technologies, see Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 50–82. 6 Neil McKendrick, ‘The Commercialisation of Fashion’, in The Birth of a Consumer Society, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (London, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland and Johnannesburg: Europa, 1982), pp. 34–99. 7 Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, Author of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, 6 vols. (London: Richard Phillips, 1804), I, p. lviii. 8 Alan Dugald McKillop, Samuel Richardson Printer and Novelist (Hamden, CT: The Shoe String Press, 1960), p. 45. 9 William B. Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1998), p. 176. 10 Keymer and Sabor, Introduction, The Pamela Controversy, I, p. xvii. 11 James Grantham Turner, ‘Novel Panic: Picture and Performance in the Reception of Richardson’s Pamela’, Representations, 48 (1994), p. 72. 12 For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Batchelor, pp. 19–51. 13 Gwilliam, pp. 32–3. 14 Conboy, p. 84; Brückmann, p. 201. 15 Batchelor, pp. 19–51. 16 Stephanie Fysh, The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997), p. 76. 17 Quoted in Keymer and Sabor, The Pamela Controversy, I, p. lxii. 18 Terri Nickel, ‘Pamela as Fetish: Masculine Anxiety in Henry Fielding’s Shamela and James Parry’s The True Anti-Pamela’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 22 (1992): 37. 19 Fysh, p. 77. 20 The Spectator, no. 102 (Wednesday 27 June 1711), The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I, pp. 426–9. 21 Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, p. 145. 22 Quoted in McKillop, p. 45. 23 Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, p. 144. As Keymer and Sabor point out, it is probable that the scene described by Postlethwaite is that in which Pamela



Notes

24

25 26 27

28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37

175

escapes from Lady Davers through the window. This immediately follows that discussed above in which Pamela flutters her fan to conceal her anger at Lady Davers’ questions (p. 145). Fysh speculates that the Pamela fan may have contained as many as twelve images (p. 77). As Keymer and Sabor point out, the images were the first of the Pamela illustrations, and may well have influenced subsequent illustrators. See Pamela in the Literary Marketplace, pp. 144, 146. Anon., The Fan. An Heroi-Comical Poem. In Three Cantos (Norwich: James Carlos, 1749), p. 10. Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, p. 145. This is not to say that Richardson opposed the modernisation of the literary marketplace – a development in which he played a key role, of course – but rather that he wished to counter some of its more damaging effects. See, for example, Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); and James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1996). Deidre Shauna Lynch, The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 8, 10. Francis Grose, A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London: S. Hooper, 1785). Christopher Flint has identified Charles Gildon’s The Golden Spy (1709) as the earliest object-narrator novel. The genre did not, however, reach the height of its popularity until the mid-century. ‘Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction’, PMLA, 113:2 (1998): 213. Aileen Douglas, ‘Britannia’s Rule and the It-Narrator’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 6:1 (1993): 68. Flint, p. 213. Flint, p. 218. Anon., Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat . . . In Which is introduced, The EPISODE of A PETTICOAT. Published in Two Parts (London: J. Brooke, 1751), p. 2. Subsequent references will be given, parenthetically, in the text. On the debates sparked by the practice of bequeathing dresses to servants, see Batchelor, pp. 19–51. Anon., The Genuine Memoirs and Most Surprising Adventures of a Very Unfortunate Goose-quill: with an Introductory Letter to Mrs. Midnight’s Tye-wig (London: M. Cooper and G. Woodfall, 1751).




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

This chapter considers books as objects of exchange in eighteenth-century Europe and asks how these texts, moving between countries in spite of wars and political tensions, shed light on questions of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and the rise of nationalism. These questions are particularly interesting with reference to Germany, not yet a country in the eighteenth century but a region with a confusing array of principalities and political alliances. Paradoxically, the absorption of books from another culture, in this instance the British, aided in German national self-definition and at the same time furthered international connection. Studying books as objects of exchange not only furthers our understanding of European literary history, but also highlights the political role of women as producers, consumers and cultural promoters. Precisely because France dominated continental literary culture in the eighteenth century, there is much to learn from studying English–German links. Examining the period after the Hanoverian succession and before the French Revolution, we view aspects of cultural exchange that scholars, from both the English and the German sides, have largely ignored. First, the gradual displacement of French products as dominant in Germany meant an opening for English books as well as German, so that what has been viewed as incipient nationalism based on a bourgeois demand for an indigenous, German literature simultaneously carried an international element. Second, a look at the book trade allows us to revise how we think about class distinctions. The standard story is one of a court culture dominated by the products of French culture, and again a rising bourgeoisie demanding and producing German goods. The two are said to have come together only in the 1780s, especially in the court of Anna Amalia of Weimar.1 But a view of book publishing and collecting, particularly among women, suggests that a merging of aristocratic and bourgeois interests occurred earlier. Third, the eighteenth-century European book market reveals what might at first appear to be a paradox: gendered cosmopolitanism. Rather than engaging in non-national detachment based on notions of liberté and fraternité, as would the supporters of the French Revolution, German aristocratic women developed a patriotic cosmopolitanism 176



11

Women’s Publishing, Collecting and Anglo-German Exchange 177

Göttingen: academic interests and publishing Some cultural ties between Britain and Germany clearly had political origins. After the establishment of the Personal Union, which made the Elector of Hanover, Georg Ludwig, George I of England in 1714, the most prominent cultural link was represented in the founding of the University of Göttingen by George II in 1734. This institution was the brainchild of Gerlach Adolf von Münchhausen, a Geheimrat of Hanover who became curator of the university and who energetically encouraged British–German exchange. The University of Göttingen was to be a modern institution, engaging in practical subjects to create a well-educated class of public servants and citizens. It would emphasise not only law, medicine and theology, but also political science and history. It would develop a botanical garden and an observatory. It would promote religious tolerance in order to appeal to students from beyond the borders of the electorate; and indeed it drew students from across Europe. Among international students British were perhaps the most numerous. Matriculation records suggest that in a representative decade, 1770–80, up to 5 per cent of students were British.2 George III sent his three youngest sons to study there, and many aristocratic and gentry families followed his example. Professors had strong ties to England. Münchhausen encouraged Göttingen scholars to spend time there and to update their knowledge, especially in fields where British thinkers were in the forefront.3 Albrecht von Haller, for example, undertook educational travels in England, wrote a travel account and remained influenced by things English his entire career, even publishing in late life a novel on Alfred the Great (1773) which touted the British political system and lionised George III.4 He became first president of the Göttinger Akademie der Wissenschaften and the first editor of its internationally respected critical journal Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen. Gottfried Achenwall, a prominent political theorist, also wrote extensively on what he viewed as the sources of English freedom. He was granted a sabbatical and spent half a year in Holland and England in 1759, which led him to revise his influential and long-used text Staatsverfassung der heutigen vornehmsten Europäischen Reiche im Grundrisse; he substantially expanded the explanation of English politics for the fourth edition.5 Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–99), however, is the best known of the Göttinger professors to travel to England. He first came to accompany the Göttingen students William Irby and Thomas Swanton home in April–May 1770. His connection with these high-ranking families (the young men were



characterised by cultural attachment. Tracing the movement of books between Britain and (what came to be) Germany thus offers fascinating insights into general European cultural links in the eighteenth century and suggests that women, despite their lack of a legal and political identity, were shaping politics by cultural means.

the sons of a lord and an admiral) made possible introductions into elevated social circles, and he was even invited by the King to visit the observatory in Richmond. The King then financed Lichtenberg’s second trip to England between September 1774 and December 1775. Lichtenberg was a royal guest at Kew for the winter. He followed the political fortunes of Wilkes and reported on the crisis with the American colonies; he observed English ways closely, commenting vividly on English street life, theatre, manufactures, science, philosophy and literature. Clarissa Campbell Orr has recently delineated his connections to Queen Charlotte; surely with her blessing, years later he became tutor to the three English princes who studied in Göttingen.6 He was elected a member of the London Royal Society in 1793. While he was a professor of physics, with interests in mathematics and astronomy, he is best known today for his trenchant aphorisms. His literary flair led him to co-edit, with Georg Forster, the Göttingische Magazin der Wissenschaften und Literatur (1780–5), and in his last years he introduced Germans to the work of William Hogarth with his Ausführliche Erklärung der Hogarthischen Kupferstiche (1794–9). Among his prized possessions were a copy of Newton’s death mask and a picture of the English King and Queen which hung above the sofa in his garden house.7 Other Göttingen institutions furthered the Anglicisation of the region. Münchhausen paid particular attention to the university library. He hired the energetic and ambitious librarians Joachim Matthias Gesner and later Christian Gottlob Heyne, who were themselves professors and built up a first-rate collection. From the start the Göttingen library vigorously bought English books; Bernhard Fabian calls it the ‘greatest repository of English books in eighteenthcentury Germany’.8 New books were quickly reviewed in the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen, and were incorporated into the first full bibliography of eighteenth-century English authors compiled, surprisingly, not by an Englishman in England but by the Göttinger assistant librarian Jeremias David Reuss as an Alphabetical Register of all the Authors Actually Living in GreatBritain, Ireland, and in the United Provinces of North-America, with a Catalogue of their Publications (1791). Reuss wrote that since he possessed ‘most of the literary resources upon which an English author could draw . . . it may perhaps not be too daring if he attempts to supply a work [i.e. this bibliography] which the English have not yet produced’. Scholars in the area participated in an early form of inter-library loan: Georg Forster in Kassel and Johann Gottfried Herder in Weimar requested that Heyne send them English volumes from Göttingen since the books could not be obtained in any other way.9 The founding of the university naturally had an impact on Göttingen’s commercial life. Most notable was the creation of the influential publishing firm Vandenhoeck. Abraham Vandenhoeck, a Dutch bookseller who had worked in London, was invited to be bookseller and printer to the university in 1735. Münchhausen’s international ties and his ambitions for the university clearly led him to choose Vandenhoeck, a non-native, for the post. Vandenhoeck died 1750, and his English wife, Anna Vandenhoeck (née Parry)



178 Alessa Johns

took over the firm. She ran it with the help of her business manager Carl Friedrich Ruprecht, to whom she ultimately willed the firm when she died in 1787. (The company, still going strong, is now called Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht and continues to be run by the Ruprecht family.) For more than thirty years Anna Vandenhoeck was pivotal in making her company one of the most respected publishers in Germany. She placed particular emphasis on foreign books: the firm published a German translation of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa as early as 1748–53, and it created a reading circle so that foreignlanguage journals and newspapers would be available to clients. Vandenhoeck’s shop was a place for scholars to meet and enjoy conversation. But it was not alone in promoting the English connection. The other prominent Göttinger bookseller, Johann Christian Dieterich, planned an entire series of English works to be edited by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, and the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung began translating English books with amazing rapidity. Although this firm was based in Leipzig, because of the complicated method of booksellers’ exchanging books among themselves (rather than using money, which differed from one principality to another), it meant that Anna Vandenhoeck always had hundreds of English books, in the original and in translation, on offer.10 Göttingen was therefore a node of anglicisation, a characteristic it shared with Hamburg, which had long had close commercial ties with Britain. In Hamburg there was an Anglican church; British diplomats resided there; social organisations with international ties, such as the Patriotische Gesellschaft and the Freemasons, were very active. An English bookshop and English journals emerged, and many of the people spreading anglophilia during the eighteenth century had a Hamburg or Göttingen connection.11 Anna Vandenhoeck’s commercial activities thus formed part of a larger tendency in the culture towards increasing interest in England and demonstrate how the market was opening up to non-French literature and language. German purchasers of English books were of course people with means, mostly aristocrats and rich bourgeois. I will therefore consider aristocrats and their ties to the bourgeois expansion of trade, considering the aristocratic approach to book-buying and focusing on Braunschweig, which was allied with England and with Prussia.

Braunschweig: cosmopolitanism and court culture Göttingen, in the Electorate of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (generally called Hanover), was closely tied not only to England through the Personal Union, but also to other Braunschweig (Brunswick) principalities as well as to Prussia, since they were territorially contiguous and linked through intermarried ruling families (see Figure 27). Especially noteworthy was a family dynasty of female intellectuals (shown in bold type in Figure 27), beginning with Sophie of Hannover. These women – with one crucial male figure, Frederick the Great, and a lesser one, Karl I – were central in fostering the intellectual and cultural




George I

Sophie Dorothea

Caroline of Ansbach

George II

Augusta of Saxe-Gotha

Frederick 7 others

Charlotte of MecklenburgStrelitz

14 others

Figure 27

George III 7 others

George IV

Sophie von Hannover

5 others

Sophie Dorothea

6 others

Friedrich I

Sophie Charlotte von Preussen

Friedrich Wilhelm

Wilhelmine Friedrich der Große Anna Amalia Philippine Charlotte von Bayreuth Äbtissin von von Braunschweig Quedlinburg

Augusta

Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Anna Amalia von Sachsen -Weimar

Caroline of Brunswick

5 others

Connections between the Houses of Hanover, Prussia and Brunswick.


Wilhelm Adolf

Karl I

10 others


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Ernst August

growth of northern Germany in the period and promoting the type of cosmopolitanism I will be describing. There is a significant salon tradition to be witnessed in provincial courts that culminated in Anna Amalia’s eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Weimar. And while the bluestocking aristocrats who were central in this process are known to Germanists and royal historians, they remain unfamiliar to other scholars. I will therefore offer brief introductions to these dynamic noblewomen before turning to the example of Philippine Charlotte, Duchess of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. Sophie von Hannover was Electress of Hanover and expected to succeed to the English throne, but she died only months before Queen Anne. She travelled extensively, collected books and paintings, corresponded with significant figures and possessed enormous energy. She was the patron of the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and took an active part in shaping his career, setting up and mediating his productive theological correspondence with the Huguenot Paul Pellisson.12 On the day that she died, in her eighties, she was taking a vigorous walk in her beloved garden in Herrenhausen. Sophie Charlotte von Preussen was the only daughter of Sophie von Hannover. She also supported Leibniz, whose Essais de Théodicee derived from conversations with her; he was ‘in despair for weeks’ when she died.13 Lietzenburg castle was the location of her renowned salon; her husband renamed it Charlottenburg in her honour.14 When Caroline of Ansbach was orphaned she came under Sophie Charlotte’s guardianship and learned much at Sophie Charlotte’s gatherings. In this context Leibniz became her tutor; he suggested books to her and they corresponded for years. Caroline was courted by and encouraged to marry Archduke Karl, the future Holy Roman Emperor. This would have meant converting to Catholicism, however. Devout and independent-minded, Caroline debated with the formidable Jesuit Father Ferdinand Orban for hours before an open Bible and finally turned down the marriage proposal. She later married Sophie Charlotte’s nephew, Georg August, who became George II of England and who felt so confident of her powers that he appointed her Regent during his long trips to Hanover. As Sophie von Hannover and Sophie Charlotte had done, Caroline mediated and moderated the correspondence of Leibniz, this time with Samuel Clarke.15 Sophie Dorothea, sister of George II, married Sophie Charlotte’s son Friedrich Wilhelm, the irascible and miserly ‘Soldier King’ of Prussia. She instilled in her children a love of music and the arts. She worked indefatigably to arrange twin marriages between her daughter Wilhelmine and the Prince of Wales and her son Frederick and Princess Amalia, but her plans were thwarted by her husband, who greatly disliked his cousin George and wanted to create stronger German and Imperial connections while frustrating British continental ambitions. Wilhelmine von Bayreuth was the favourite sister of Frederick the Great, with whom she corresponded for over thirty years. She built a famous rococo




opera house, where the latest compositions, including many of her own, were performed; she was close to Voltaire; helped to found the University of Erlangen; introduced innovations in the gardens of the court at Bayreuth; and amassed a book collection of 5000 volumes. Philippine Charlotte was a younger sister of Frederick the Great, and kept up a lifelong correspondence with him. She was lively and apparently appealed to everyone, even her moody father. She married Karl I, the Duke of BraunschweigWolfenbüttel, and in what appears to have been an unusually peaceful partnership they created a court atmosphere in the tradition of Sophie Charlotte and Sophie Dorothea. Anna Amalia of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach was a daughter of Philippine Charlotte and is perhaps the best known of these learned noblewomen. Patron of the poets Goethe and Schiller and ‘muse of Weimar’, she transformed that small town into a cultural centre where the brightest talents of the era congregated. It has been said that her parents’ court epitomised the baroque, while Anna Amalia brought court culture into the classical era. Though her contributions are better known than those of her predecessors, she was clearly drawing on a family history of promoting arts and letters, a family history that moved mostly through the women. Only recently has her education in Wolfenbüttel and Braunschweig received closer attention; thanks to Joachim Berger we now have a thoroughgoing biography of this significant figure in German politicalcultural history.16

Book collecting and borrowing in Braunschweig In addition to promoting court culture and salon discourses, the PrussianBraunschweig women participated in the book market. They created substantial collections and some of these were then donated to public libraries; the Herzog August Bibliothek, central to this story, possesses manuscript catalogues of the aristocratic book collections that were willed to this remarkable library. Not only do these catalogues offer fascinating evidence of continental European reading habits, they also reveal how the collections were gendered (the Duchesses kept libraries separate from the Dukes), and what the nature of influence from one generation to another might have been (we have catalogues from parents as well as sons and daughters). Jacqueline Pearson has lamented the dearth of evidence concerning English women’s libraries: ‘Following the fortunes of women’s libraries is . . . problematic since few women had independent libraries . . . though they might have access to those of fathers, husbands, or sons.’17 In contrast, there is ample evidence from Germany of independent women’s collections, for example that of Duchess Philippine Charlotte (1716–1801), sister of Frederick the Great, niece of George II and mother of Anna Amalia. She is not well known – we have no full biography – but her social centrality makes her a good representative.



182 Alessa Johns

Philippine Charlotte was a formidable woman, proud of her birth and rank, which she enjoyed displaying. Visitors commented on her diamonds and lavish table, to which she frequently invited her preferred guests, professors from the Collegium Carolinum and the University of Helmstedt. Because she left her library to the Herzog August Bibliothek, we know that she had about 4000 volumes, a very impressive number for a private library in this period – about the same size as the other most notable libraries of female aristocrats of the time.18 She had a catalogue compiled of this impressive collection and even spent an afternoon reading the catalogue to a visitor. Despite Philippine Charlotte’s penchant for show, she clearly intended the catalogue and the library for personal edification. In the sermon preached at her funeral, J. W. G. Wolff, the cathedral clergyman, said that Philippine Charlotte saw the collection more as a useful means to enlightenment and inner development than for outward display. Indeed, a letter to her librarian confirms this; she wrote that he should remove 140 volumes and exchange them for 33 others, since the 140 she had identified ‘aren’t helpful and are more for show than use’.19 Philippine Charlotte demonstrated a remarkable cosmopolitanism in her collecting habits and in this she appears representative of aristocratic women. Hers were the choices of a liberal, enlightened and well-informed intellectual, even if there are no works in Latin and Greek. In fact, most works are in French, the language in which she always wrote and often spoke. Subject headings in the systematic catalogue include: Theology and Church History, Morals, Politics, History, Natural History, Law, Medicine, Mathematics, the Arts, Games, Logic, Literature, Comedies and Novels. The library is dominated by male authors, including among the English: Addison and Steele, Burnet, Defoe, Hume, Samuel Johnson, Law, Locke, Milton, Pope, Shaftesbury, Shakespeare, Sterne and Swift. There does not appear to be much self-censorship; the authors often reflect controversial and reformist points of view. Among the French and Italian authors are Barbeiras, Beccaria, Machiavelli, Rabelais, Rousseau, Saint Pierre, Voltaire and Volney. Despite the preponderance of male authors, Philippine Charlotte was particularly interested in works by and about women.20 She collected translations; numerous letter collections; biographies, autobiographies and memoirs (both by and about women); poetry, novels and collected works; scientific publications; courtesy books; and secret histories. Wide-ranging, cosmopolitan, women-oriented collecting habits are true also of Philippine Charlotte’s sisters Wilhelmine and Anna Amalia. (This Anna Amalia is not to be confused with her daughter; her sister was the Abbess of Quedlinburg and an accomplished musician.) Marc Serge Rivière and Annett Volmer have helpfully compared Anna Amalia’s library with that of her brother, Frederick the Great, and concluded: Amalia was far better read and more cosmopolitan than her celebrated brother; she grew into a more universal and a more rounded individual who, admittedly, had much more time to use her library than the warring




184 Alessa Johns

Philippine Charlotte’s library, nearly twice the size of Amalia’s, reveals the same differences from Frederick’s and the same preoccupations. If Frederick encouraged the reading of his sisters, they were inspired to move beyond his particular predilections. In addition to feeling solidarity with women of different nationalities, Philippine Charlotte maintained a cosmopolitan outlook that was prompted by her ambitions for her family. There were marriages to be arranged, and Philippine Charlotte had her sights on England. That she and her brother had strongly differing views on this is evident in her half of an exchange of letters.22 She wrote to Frederick of how she enjoyed a visit from the English King George II, who was polite and gracious and reminded her of their mother (George II’s sister): the same face, eyes, manner and way of speaking. She was forced abruptly to change her tune, however, in a response to what must have been an angry reply from Frederick. She wrote: ‘You are quite right that there’s no comparison to be made between him and our worthy mother’; he is ignorant, vain, conceited and believes no one to be more powerful than he is. ‘I expect nothing from his breed’ (pp. 83–6). But she then went on to ask why Frederick was angry with her husband, so that one gets the impression that her backtracking on George II was intended to appease her moody brother. This conclusion is supported by her undiminished pursuit of family links with England; she worked to arrange a marriage between a daughter and George’s grandson, the future George III. Having borrowed a copy of a History of England from the Herzog August Bibliothek to prepare for her trip to Hanover, she travelled with her daughters Caroline and Anna Amalia to meet George II, who offered ‘every distinction imaginable’. He was most impressed with Caroline and gave Philippine Charlotte hope that ‘l’affaire en question sera bientôt decidée’ (p. 106). That match was not to be, but Philippine Charlotte eventually married her son to George III’s sister and her granddaughter Caroline to George IV. Philippine Charlotte respected her brother, but felt no compunction about resisting his will when it served the interests of her own family. The same independent spirit manifested itself in her ideas about reading. Frederick made suggestions, but Philippine Charlotte came to her own conclusions. When Frederick sent her a volume of Cicero, for example, she challenged the ancient author’s notions about the virtue of denying pain and defended what she felt constituted a natural human response. ‘On voit bien que Cicéron n’est jamais accouché’ (p. 30). In her next letter she expressed delight that Frederick agreed with her (p. 32), and went on to mention that she was reading Epictetus, Fontenelle, ‘la mort de Socrate’ and Reinbeck on the immortality of the soul.



king . . . He read mostly in French translation; she was very proficient in French, English and German, though not in Latin and Greek . . . [she] was true to her sex.21

Most of all, however, Philippine Charlotte’s international interest was fostered by the Collegium Carolinum professors. To be mentioned in this regard especially are Johann Friederich Jerusalem (1709–89), Johann Arnold Ebert (1723–95) and Johann Joachim Eschenburg (1743–1820). The latter two were prominent German translators from the English. Ebert is best known for his translation of Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’; he also taught the Crown Prince. Eschenburg is best known for translating Shakespeare as well as aesthetic works of Brown, Webb, Hurd, Priestley and Burney. Most notable of all was Jerusalem, whom Karl and Philippine Charlotte hired in 1742 to be tutor to their sons and preacher to the court. Jerusalem had travelled in Holland as well as in England, where he resided for three years. There he made the acquaintance of important intellectuals and clergy (Archbishop Potter, Bishop Sherlock, Waterland, Whiston, Foster) and was swayed by Latitudinarianism. He almost decided to stay in England. He was the most prominent intellectual in the court; he must have been one of Philippine Charlotte’s favourite dinner guests and exercised some influence on the choices of books for her collection. He became head of the Collegium Carolinum, a new-style institution that emphasised modern languages, the sciences, engineering and practical subjects rather than a classical curriculum. It fostered religious tolerance, emphasised the development of judgement and taste, and sought to minimise class distinctions. According to Jerusalem, the performance of students alone, not their rank, would determine how they were judged.23 The sons of the Duke and Duchess attended alongside members of the bourgeoisie. Like the University of Göttingen it was influenced by English ideas and it too attracted British students.24 Certainly, the book collection of Philippine Charlotte’s son, Wilhelm Adolf, reflects his education at Jerusalem’s hands: when he died in battle at age 25 in 1770 his collection came to the Herzog August Library where it remains to this day. The manuscript catalogue compiled at that time lists dozens of English authors, most of whose books are in the original: represented are works by Addison, Bacon, Bolingbroke, Burnet, Defoe, Dryden, Henry Fielding, Sarah Fielding, Adam Fitzadam, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Delarivier Manley, Sherlock, Steele, Tillotson, Warburton, Watts, Wollaston and Young. He also owned a two-volume edition of English Miscellanies edited by John Tompson, which must have served him as a language-acquisition text. The full title reads: English Miscellanies consisting of various pieces of divinity, morals, politicks, philosophy and history; as likewise some choice poems; all collected out of the most approved authors in the English Tongue Viz. Tillotson Nichols Lock Milton Cowley Waller Denham Dryden Buckingham Prior Addison Pope etc. And chiefly intended for the Advantage of such, as are willing to apply themselves to the Learning of this usefull Language. Wilhelm Adolf acquired the third edition, one especially interesting in this context because it was published in Göttingen ‘for the widow of Abram Vandenhoeck, 1755’.25 We therefore see a direct connection between Göttingen and the provincial courts, between the anglicised milieu of the Hanoverian




university town and the Braunschweig principality that was, on so many levels – geographically, politically, ideologically, maritally – located directly between England and Prussia. Unlike her brother Frederick, Philippine Charlotte collected not only English books but also German ones, and in a number of ways the welcome to British texts occurred simultaneously for German ones – both were reactions against French hegemony. Though the emphasis on German language authors in this period is generally associated with bourgeois writers and thinkers, there were crucial aristocratic supporters of the new intellectual developments. For her part, Philippine Charlotte is credited with hiring Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to be librarian at the Herzog August Bibliothek, and her book collection contained all his works. Lessing, a leader among bourgeois eighteenth-century German writers, wrote and first produced his celebrated tragedy, Emilia Galotti, in Wolfenbüttel to honour Philippine Charlotte on her birthday. If that play critiques aristocratic ways, Philippine Charlotte herself was ready to take up progressive points of view. With her sister Amalia during dinner on a visit to their brother, she argued for the value of German literature and thereby provoked Frederick’s famous and disparaging essay, ‘De la littérature allemande, des défauts qu’on peut lui reprocher, quelles en sont les causes, et par quelles moyens on peut les corriger’ (1780).26 Philippine Charlotte also inspired, in rebuttal, Jerusalem’s letter-essay ‘Ueber die Teutsche Sprache und Litteratur. An Ihro Koenigliche Hoheit die verwittwete Frau Herzogin von Braunschweig und Lueneburg’.27 Addressing his arguments to his patron Philippine Charlotte, Jerusalem defended German authors from Frederick’s criticisms. He insisted that recent indigenous writers had come far and achieved a national literature worthy of international recognition. He wrote that far from being provincial, the productions of Klopstock, Gessner, Wieland, Gellert and Lessing ‘are classic for all of Germany’.28 Jerusalem’s focus on national literature had as its goal not only the development of a German identity, but also participation in international exchange. He argued, for example, that because it is only the difficulty of the German language and the illegible lettering that keeps other nations from benefiting from German productions, German orthography should be changed. Jerusalem’s argument challenged French domination and made space for indigenous German writing as well as English contributions. The essay was considered important enough to be summarised and evaluated in the Monthly Review;29 clearly, Britain’s intellectual elite was intensely interested in the literary developments of the Germans, who, alongside increases in commercial, diplomatic and intellectual exchanges between the countries, had done so much to support British interests in the Seven Years’ War. Jerusalem’s style of argument encouraged rather than discouraged cosmopolitanism. Consideration of his style helps call into question the oversimplified notion reinforced by recent theorists like Benedict Anderson: that is, that a tradition of humanist, universalist cosmopolitanism deriving



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from an early modern tradition and depending on Latin communication was overtaken in the eighteenth century by nationalist tendencies promoting indigenous writers and a national literature. When one considers the evidence of the literary-cultural activities of a provincial court, its energetic Duchess, and the thinkers she sought to surround her, we see that the arguments in favour of German literature went hand-in-hand with enlightened internationalist ideas.30 This more complex view is corroborated by developments in the German literature market. Bernhard Fabian has pointed out that in the early decades of the eighteenth century, journals in Germany moved from addressing an elite, educated audience to reviewing, in German, literature for a regional readership. This did not mean a retreat to parochialism, since editors consistently ‘drew attention to significant foreign publications’, thereby ‘opening new perspectives on the intellectual life abroad’. That is, longstanding humanist paradigms were giving way to an era of general cosmopolitanism. Even before the French Revolution, cultural movement was away from the intellectual elite to the mainstream, and away from being female-exclusive to femaleinclusive. In the reviews, Fabian notes, foreign works were evaluated ‘not in the older tradition as contributions to an international body of scholarly literature, but in a more modern fashion as the products of a foreign literature’.31 Despite being written in foreign languages and therefore seemingly nationbound, works of literature were actually becoming more available, crossing borders, more likely to be translated and reaching more diverse readers rather than being limited to a small scholarly circle. Philippine Charlotte’s library reflects this moment, as does Vandenhoeck’s translation of Clarissa. Moreover, such increased availability of foreign works is resoundingly reinforced by the astonishing catalogue of books available in Vandenhoeck’s shop in 1785, a fascinating and rare document from which, for the sake of space, I will mention only titles by British women authors available in German translation (along with the year of that edition): Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1770), Frances Brooke, History of Emily Montague (1769), Hester Chapone, Letters (1774), Sarah Fielding, Countess of Dellwyn (1761), David Simple (1746), Familiar Letters (1759), Life of Octavia (1761) and Ophelia (1763), Mary Hamilton, Duchess de Crui (1776–77), Eliza Haywood [?], History of Miss Jenny (1770), Charlotte Lennox, Henrietta (1761), Delarivier Manley, New Atalantis (1740), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Letters (1763), Sarah Scott, History of Cornelia (1762) and Millenium Hall (1768), Frances Sheridan, Miss Sidney Bidulph (1770), Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Friendship in Death (1777), and Poetical Works (1772).32 Since this list represents only the books on her shelves for the year 1785, one can only imagine the wealth of volumes that moved through her shop over the course of three decades. The democratisation implied by this development concerned class as well as gender. The Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel – remarkably, a public library from the 1660s – offers a special opportunity to examine this revolutionary shift. For it possesses not only the manuscript catalogues of




aristocrats like Philippine Charlotte and her son Wilhelm Adolf, but also the Ausleihbücher (withdrawal books) which show what the lower classes read. Mechthild Raabe has published and analysed the withdrawal books of the library, which show that readers of all classes and both sexes checked out volumes: carpenters, servants, soldiers, students, clergy. Their participation reached a peak in the period 1760–80; they brought about an enormous increase in the withdrawal of belles-lettres. Many foreigners visited the library and consulted volumes; Philippine Charlotte herself checked out books she could not consult in her own collection, for example, the Qu’ran and a book concerning Indian philosophy. After the French Revolution many French émigrés settled in Wolfenbüttel and Braunschweig, and judging from the number of their withdrawals, they were clearly delighted to have a library so well stocked for their use.33 A study of the eighteenth-century European book trade, its relation to the political ties between England and Germany, and the interesting picture of bookselling and book-buying we can glean from case studies of Lower Saxony offer us occasion for revising our views of eighteenth-century international understanding. Pauline Kleingeld has documented how cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century was advocated by German thinkers on various levels – moral, political, intellectual, cultural, economic and spiritual – and she traces how it gave way to growing nationalism after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.34 Yet the women’s version evident in the court of Philippine Charlotte and the shop of Anna Vandenhoeck, situated within the broader cultural movements I have traced, suggests that their orientation and type of cosmopolitanism was of a more pragmatic, embedded nature. Moreover, it probably survived the Revolution. Studies of the rise of nationalism in the eighteenth century have tended to concentrate on individual nations and their imperial strivings, privileging analysis of colonial competition between European lands while downplaying intra-European ties. Consequently, the place of gender in the international European context has hardly been broached. I have therefore chosen to emphasise case studies from the same geographic region, Lower Saxony, that involve women of different national origins and classes in an attempt to show how politically marginal figures such as Anna Vandenhoeck and Philippine Charlotte none the less contributed to the larger picture. The expansion of the book trade, as Benedict Anderson has pointed out, was crucial for national self-definition in this period, but I am suggesting that it simultaneously enabled internationalism on the ground. These women’s cosmopolitan inclinations shared certain sources, being closely related to their social positions and family fortunes within a context of growing British–German exchange. Vandenhoeck in Göttingen supported the translation of significant British publications, promoted British journals through a reading circle and offered great numbers of British volumes, in the original and in translation, for sale at her shop. She willed money – and she was one of the richest citizens of



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Göttingen – to two telling groups: the Reformed Church, a congregation at this time involved with Huguenot immigrants and perhaps even conducting services in French, and the fund for professors’ widows.35 Philippine Charlotte likewise remembered the widows of the Helmstedt professors in her will. She also left an income to the émigrée French Princess of Montmorency to be certain that this aristocratic, exiled Frenchwoman would not be left without resources in another land. These monied women to the end sought to mitigate the adverse effects of a restrictive socio-politics of gender and nation; their wills demonstrate acute sensitivity to the plight of vulnerable ladies in donations that looked beyond national boundaries.36 The evidence we have from female participants in the eighteenth-century book market thus reinforces a sense of the depth of gender identification and the importance of family connections. Women’s lack of political identity and clout contributed to their interest in promoting a quotidian rather than transcendent cosmopolitanism that can be contrasted with the type derived from theories of liberty and fraternity that inspired revolutionary activity. Cosmopolitanism has been seen to derive from a sense of detachment, where universal notions of human behaviour and a well-lived life outweigh a person’s loyalty to hearth and home. But I have argued that a look at women’s activities and intellectual preoccupations demonstrates that gender can trump nationalism, that there is a type of cosmopolitanism deriving from some women’s experience that allows for both patriotism and international identification.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Herzog August Bibliotek for generously supporting the research for this chapter and to Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht for allowing access to the firm’s archives.

Notes 1 Barbara Becker-Cantarino, ‘Introduction: German Literature in the Era of Enlightenment and Sensibility’, German Literature of the Eighteenth Century: The Enlightenment and Sensibility (Rochester: Boydell and Brewer, 2005), pp. 4–5. 2 Götz von Selle, ed., Die Matrikel der Georg-August-Universität zu Göttingen 1734–1837 (Hildesheim: August Lax, 1937), pp. 184–255. 3 Michael Maurer, Aufklärung und Anglophilie in Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), pp. 47–50. 4 Maurer, p. 39. 5 Maurer, pp. 64–6. 6 Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen of Great Britain and Electress of Hanover: Northern Dynasties and the Northern Republic of Letters’, in Queenship in Europe 1660–1815: The Role of the Consort, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 368–402. 7 Maurer, p. 291.




8 Bernhard Fabian, ‘English Books and their Eighteenth-Century German Readers’, in The Widening Circle: Essays on the Circulation of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Paul J. Korshin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp. 140, 164–5. 9 Fabian, p. 165; Maurer, p. 48. 10 Barbara Lösel, Die Frau als Persönlichkeit im Buchwesen: Dargestellt am Beispiel der Göttinger Verlegerin Anna Vandenhoeck (1709–1787) (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1991). This thesis contains a list of books published between 1750 and 1787. See also Lösel’s article in ‘Des Kennenlernens Werth’: Bedeutende Frauen Göttingens, ed. Traudel Weber-Reich (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1993), pp. 13–26. 11 Fabian, p. 163; Maurer, pp. 41–4. 12 D. Bertoloni Meli, ‘Caroline, Leibniz, and Clarke’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999): 471. 13 Bertoloni Meli, p. 473. 14 See also John Van der Kiste, The Georgian Princesses (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), p. 36. 15 Bertoloni Meli, p. 472. 16 Joachim Berger, Anna Amalia von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (1739–1807): Denk- und Handlungsräume einer ‘aufgeklärten’ Herzogin (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003). 17 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 153. 18 Caroline of Hesse, see Herrmann Braeunig-Oktavio, ‘Die Bibliothek der grossen Landgräfin Caroline von Hessen’, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 6 (1966): 682–875; Viktor Amadeus and Elise von Hessen-Rotenburg, see The Corvey Library and Anglo-German Cultural Exchanges, 1770–1837 (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2004); Luise of Sachsen-Gotha, see Jenny von der Osten, Luise Dorothee Herzogin von Sachsen-Gotha 1732–1767 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1893); Philippine Charlotte’s daughter Anna Amalia, see Bärbel Raschke, ‘Die Bibliothek der Herzogin Anna Amalia’, in Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek: Kulturgeschichte einer Sammlung (München: Hanser Verlag, 1999), pp. 83–6. 19 Ingrid Münch, ‘Testament und Begräbnis der Herzogin Philippine Charlotte v. Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1716–1801)’, Braunschweigisches Jahrbuch, 68 (1987): 70. 20 Other aristocratic book collectors shared such an interest; see Sabine Heißler, ‘Christine Charlotte von Ostfriesland (1645–1699) und Ihre Bücher, oder, Lesen Frauen Anderes?’, Daphnis: Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur, 27 (1998): 335–418; Marc Serge Rivière and Annett Volmer, eds., The Library of an Enlightened Prussian Princess: Catalogue of the Non-music Sections of the Amalien-Bibliothek (Berlin: Verlag Arno Spitz, 2002). 21 Rivière and Volmer, pp. 66, 71. 22 Hans Droysen, ed., Aus den Briefen der Herzogin Philippine Charlotte von Braunschweig 1732–1801, Vol. 1 (Wolfenbüttel: Zwissler, 1916). The intended Volume 2 never appeared. Subsequent references will be cited, parenthetically, in the text. 23 ‘In Ansehung des Standes wird . . . kein Unterschied gemacht; die Aufführung macht diesen ganz allein’; Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem, ‘Absicht und erste Einrichtung des Collegii Carolini’, in Nachgelassene Schriften, 2 vols. (Braunschweig: n.p., 1793), p. 93. Quoted in Maurer, p. 54. 24 Maurer, p. 56. 25 This title does not appear on Lösel’s list. 26 See Horst Steinmetz, ed. and afterword, Friedrich II, König von Preussen, und die deutsche Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts: Texte und Dokumente (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985).



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27 Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Jerusalem, Ueber die Teutsche Sprache und Litteratur. An Ihro Koenigliche Hoheit die verwittwete Frau Herzogin von Braunschweig und Lueneburg (Berlin: n.p., 1781). See also Über die deutsche Litteratur: Koenig Friderich, Jerusalem, Tralles (München: Joh. Baptist Strobl, 1781). 28 Jerusalem, p. 10. 29 Monthly Review, 65 (1781): 504–8. 30 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London and New York: Verso, 1991), esp. pp. 37–46. 31 Fabian, p. 147. 32 Vollständiges Verzeichniss der Bücher, welche um beygesezte Preise zu haben sind bey sel. Abraham Vandenhöcks Witwe, Universitätsbuchhändlerin zu Göttingen, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1785). 33 Mechthild Raabe, Leser und Lektüre im 18. Jahrhundert: Die Ausleihbücher der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel 1714–1799 (München: K. G. Saur, 1989). 34 Pauline Kleingeld, ‘Six Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999): 505–24. 35 Lösel, p. 41. 36 Münch, p. 55.




‘Books without which I cannot write’: How Did Eighteenth-century Women Writers Get the Books They Read? Susan Staves

I offer this essay as homage to libraries and to borrowing books. I also mean it as a riposte to the emphasis on shopping and consumerism in social history and cultural studies beginning in the 1980s. Shopping surely has importance, but I do not believe we are what we buy. Certainly for the eighteenth century, it would be truer to say, ‘We are what we borrow’. I am sure that one origin of my own scholarly career lies in the strange and wild euphoria I felt as a New York City child allowed to browse in the adult stacks of the Queensborough New York City Public Library – a library not quite as large and imposing as the Manhattan Library, but large and imposing enough, and possessed of its own pair of stone lions on the steps. As a grown-up scholar, I felt a kindred joy and gratitude to the people of Ireland when I was able to walk into the National Library of Ireland and call for any eighteenth-century Irish newspaper or rare book I wanted, without having paid any fee or shown any identification, not even a passport. These great public libraries, open without charge to knowledge-seekers – rich and poor, male and female alike – are fulfilments of one of the Enlightenment’s utopian dreams. They respond to the conviction that there is public value in providing citizens with books that help them to improve themselves intellectually and spiritually and to add to humanity’s stores of knowledge and culture. Among the pioneers of the free library movement, Dr Thomas Bray, also a founding member of the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, in 1697 published his visionary Essay towards Promoting all Necessary and Useful Knowledge, both Divine and Human, in all Parts of his Majesty’s Dominions. Bray’s Proposal and the Committee formed to execute it led to the establishment of 56 parish-based libraries by 1730.1 The British Library opened in 1759, according to its Statutes and Rules, chiefly for ‘the use of learned and studious men, both natives and foreigners, in their researches into the several parts of knowledge’.2 Individuals were required to apply to the Library’s trustees for permission to read and to give a day’s notice of which book or manuscript they wished to consult. Yet such improvements in access to books did not satisfy knowledge-hungry eighteenth-century readers, including the women writers who are my focus 192



12

here. In her 1778 utopian novel Munster Village, Lady Mary Walker includes a large public library, ‘stocked with whatever the lower people’s interest, or the man of taste’s curiosity can desire’.3 She editorialises that London ‘after so many ages, remains without any considerable public library’, complaining that the Royal Society Library is not open to the public and the new British Library, still insufficiently ‘available to the public’, is rich in manuscripts, but ‘wretchedly poor in printed books’.4 How did eighteenth-century women writers get the books they read? Women, of course, were excluded from some of the most important sources of books for eighteenth-century male writers: grammar schools, public schools, universities and the Inns of Court. Yet, as we shall see, perhaps surprisingly, these women writers gained access to books in many of the ways twenty-firstcentury writers do. I will organise my survey of their methods to begin with those that were relatively impersonal, methods in which books were most like commodities, and to end with those that were relatively personal, methods in which books were most like gifts. The survey will be far from exhaustive, but I hope it will be suggestive and point to issues worth further inquiry. My principle of organisation is an expository convenience, since, as we shall see, the lines between public and private and between commodity and gift are not easy to establish.

Purchase An apparently simple way for a woman writer to acquire a book was to buy it from a bookseller or auctioneer, either new or used. Some important woman writers – Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Hester Thrale Piozzi among them – were rich and could buy many books. At Lady Mary’s death, her library contained some 1500 volumes.5 An advantage of owning a book outright, one especially vivid to a writer, was that the owner could write in her book. Piozzi, described as ‘an inveterate scribbler of marginalia’, remarked, ‘I have a Trick of writing in the Margins of my Books, it is not a good Trick, but one longs to say something & cannot stop to take out the Thralianna [her journal]’.6 Piozzi, author of Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson, the rival biography that scooped Boswell’s Life, bought two copies of Boswell’s Life. She copiously annotated each with her own comments, reflections and rebuttals (Figure 28). When Boswell described Mr Thrale as being ‘of a sound understanding, and of manners such as presented the character of a plain independent English “Squire”’, Piozzi corrected him: ‘no, no; Mr Thrale’s manners presented the Character of a Gay Man of the Town: Like Millamant in Congreve’s Comedy, he abhorred the Country & Every Thing in it.’7 Next to Boswell’s account of an old man who warned the young Johnson that he should read diligently when he was young, since when he was old he would find ‘poring upon books will be an irksome task’, Piozzi wrote in, ‘not in me at 80 years old’.8



How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 193

Figure 28 Hester Piozzi’s annotations to James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (5th edn, 1807). By permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.

A writer’s book like Piozzi’s, originally purchased as a commodity product of publishing in an age of mechanical reproduction, has, by virtue of its copious and passionate marginalia, become a unique and personal object. Indeed, Piozzi inscribed the book ‘Bought of Upham/Bath/Nov. 1816/By Hester Lynch Piozzi’. Whereas Boswell’s book had disparaged Piozzi’s authority on the subject of Johnson – he disparaged the wisdom of women generally – her copy aims to re-establish them. That may explain in part why the American poet and bibliophile Amy Lowell bought this copy and, it is said, read the marginalia aloud ‘in a manner suggestive of the charm of Madam Piozzi herself’.9 Most women writers were much poorer than Montagu or Piozzi, less able to afford books. Women’s having less disposable income than men also meant that in an age when books were relatively expensive, women were generally less able to buy them than were men. James Raven, who has done invaluable work on book history and reading in this period, estimates that an annual income of £50 was about the minimum required for regular buying of books. He notes that in 1780 only about 150,000 households had that much income, and even in those households, the women did not necessarily have sufficient control of spending to decide that books would be bought.10 Piozzi observes,



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‘The Man has more Money in his Pocket, his Money is his own. The Woman is commonly responsible for her expenses to a Father, a Brother, or a Husband.’11 Nevertheless, even some impecunious women writers were able to purchase books on credit. Recent work in economic history has convincingly argued that retail credit depending on personal relationships and social status continued to be a crucial way of getting goods throughout the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth centuries, despite the supposed arrival of the impersonal cash nexus of the modern market.12 While economic historians have understandably been more attentive to provisions like food and clothes than to books, there is evidence that at least some women writers purchased books on credit, even when they could not afford them. Judith Stanton’s excellent edition of the letters of Charlotte Smith, for instance, reveals the debt-ridden Smith adding debts to London, Bath and Oxford booksellers to her other debts.13 It may well be that, like gentry social status, being a well-known writer was a form of social capital which – with booksellers at least – enabled a writer to procure retail credit.

Books as professional supplies Happily, writers without much wealth, then as now, could also get access to books, not for money, but in exchange for their services. The young Mary Wollstonecraft was not a very happy governess, but working as governess for Viscount and Lady Kingsborough in Ireland she profited from access to the Viscount’s library. Writing to her sister from Dublin, she declared, ‘I have plenty of books. I am now reading some philosophical lectures, and metaphysical sermons – for my own private improvement’. Already the author of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Wollstonecraft began to imagine living independently as a writer and described herself, living with the Kingsboroughs, as ‘almost as deeply in immersed in study as the Baron himself’.14 Schoolteachers like the young Hannah More and Sophia and Harriet Lee used their pupils’ school fees to buy books both for their pupils and themselves.15 Writers might get books because they were expected to use them to produce books of their own. One cannot produce a translation or adaptation without a copy of the original work. Translation was both an important part of the eighteenth-century literary system and a mode of composition of special importance to women. Sometimes women writers purchased texts they translated or adapted, but sometimes those texts were supplied to them as a form of patronage or as necessary supplies by theatre managers or publishers. The market value of a translation often derived from its currency, and theatre managers and publishers were in better positions to know what was likely to be in fashion than most women writers were. David Garrick, who thought carefully about what current French plays might succeed at Drury Lane, provided Elizabeth Griffith with several plays to translate and adapt, including Beaumarchais’s Eugénie, which became her most successful play,




The School for Rakes.16 Garrick also first welcomed the French actor Anthony Le Texier to Drury Lane in 1775. Le Texier went on to have a varied career in England, one part of which included advising on the selection of French plays for adaptation and working for Thomas Harris, the manager of Covent Garden. Elizabeth Inchbald’s pocket diary records Le Texier calling on her to deliver French texts that she adapted into her plays, Hue and Cry and False Appearances. In 1788, she records Harris himself coming to her lodgings with a copy of Madame de Genlis’s Zélie, which Inchbald liked very much and adapted as The Child of Nature.17 In the latter part of the century, as women writers became more established in the literary system, publishers began more frequently to supply them with books for commissioned projects. One of the first regular women book reviewers, Wollstonecraft got copies of the books she was to review for the Analytical from its publisher, Joseph Johnson. When Longman’s bought the rights to Bell’s British Theatre from Bell and decided to bring out a new edition in 1806 they contracted Inchbald, by then a leading playwright, to write a series of introductions to each of the 125 plays in the series. Longmans supplied Inchbald with copies of Bell’s versions of the plays in batches as she wrote her introductions, although her journal suggests they eventually got them back, substituting some copies of the new edition as a ‘present’.18 Throughout the century, publishers also supplied their authors with some books that were not necessarily for already contracted or commissioned projects. Here there seems to have been considerable ambiguity and room for misunderstanding and ill feeling. A publisher might be willing to give one of his authors a book that in a general way facilitated the sort of writing that author was doing for him, or he might be willing to make the author a ‘present’ of a book as part of maintaining an ongoing relationship with that author. Sometimes publishers lent authors books they had published, expecting the copy to be returned. Sometimes they simply acted as booksellers, sending authors requested books, but expecting to be paid, either by offsetting the amount against what they owed the author or in cash. At other times, publishers used books as part of their payments to authors. The novelist Mrs Woodfin, for instance, in 1764 gave her publisher Lowndes a receipt for 5 guineas and 5 guineas in books, presumably payment for her novel, The Discovery, or the History of Miss Marian Middleton.19 Whether a particular book sent by a publisher was meant as part of the author’s payment or as a gift or simply as a commodity for which the publisher expected market price was not always clear. Charlotte Smith’s correspondence with her publishers Cadell and Davies shows her exploiting the ambiguities of books as currency between a publisher and his author. Smith, as readers of her novels and poems and readers of Loraine Fletcher’s biography know, had a difficult life. She was pressed into marriage at fifteen with an irresponsible and nasty husband, separated from



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him after a spell in debtors’ prison, then tried to bring up a large family of ten children without his help, earning money by writing. She had one son return from the battle of Dunkirk in 1793 with his leg amputated and suffered the death of her much-loved daughter Anna Augusta when Anna Augusta was only 21. Her efforts at writing were impeded by physical suffering, which included some form of arthritis and/or gout in her fingers. Smith’s distresses, however, were aggravated by her insistence on maintaining the forms of gentility into which she had been born, for herself and for her children, despite the fact that her income could not support them. Smith’s many letters to Cadell and Davies frequently request books. Often the requests are unaccompanied by any suggestion that she intends to pay, as she seems to have hoped the publishers would honour at least some of these requests by considering the books part of their payment to her, as support of her ongoing writing, or as gifts to one of their valued authors. Thus, she makes unadorned requests for Piozzi’s new Observations and Reflections, Anna Seward’s Llangollen Vale, with other Poems, Robert Southey’s Poems and many, many more. Considering that Smith also used her publishers as a private bank, borrowing money from them, and that she was usually in debt, even when she does offer to pay – which she seems to do more often when their relationship is strained – they cannot have been very sanguine that they would be paid. At other times, Smith uses Cadell and Davies as a kind of circulating library or as a source of books that she can read on approval. Thus, we find her in 1798 returning their copy of James Lightfoot’s Flora Scotica, or, A Systematic Arrangement, in the Linnæan Method, of the Native Plants of Scotland, a book relevant to both her Elegiac Sonnets and her Rural Walks.20 In the same year, she asks to borrow Thomas Gisborne’s Walks in a Forest: or, Poems Descriptive of Scenery & Incidents Characteristic of a Forest, at Different Seasons of the Year, one of their books that had recently gone into a third edition. She writes, ‘I will purchase it if I like it. If not, return it uninjur’d’.21 In an essay on the publication of history in the eighteenth century, Karen O’Brien observed that, in the absence of foundations that made grants to scholars, publishers supported historical research by paying some research expenses of historical writers.22 Here we see Cadell and Davies offering a roughly similar kind of support to a writer, not an historian, by supplying her with access to books that she could not otherwise have afforded. While one has sympathy for Smith’s hardships and struggle, it is difficult for a fiscally responsible modern bourgeois reader like myself to read her letters without some sympathy for her publishers as well. She often couples her requests for particular books with heart-wrenching accounts of sufferings characteristic of the begging letter, implying that any man connected with such a suffering woman would have to be hard-hearted indeed to bill her for something so small, but so necessary to her, as a book – or books. I cannot resist quoting




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My Son Charles has occasion for a Set of Emmeline, one of Ethelinda, & one of Celestina, also a copy of ‘the Emigrants’ bound, and a Copy of the last Edition of the Sonnets. These are for a present to the Surgeon who has attended him since the loss of his leg before Dunkirk with great assiduity and kindness, and who prefers this present to the Money he must otherwise have been complimented with. Indebted as I am to you, I know not whether I ought to request your farther indulgence for the amount of these books, but as My Son has yet receivd no compensation from Government (tho I conclude he will) his misfortune has been an additional expence to me, and a great addition to the misery it has pleas’d God to have inflicted upon me . . . I have no doubt but that from your general liberality you will oblige my Son Charles in the present request . . .23 Explicitly recognising that Davies has a legal right to charge her for these books, Smith aims to make it appear that he has no moral right. Moreover, she suggests that a right-thinking publisher in a relationship with her will understand that this is not really a market relation, but rather one determined by a gift economy. Here and elsewhere, Smith implies that she is only temporarily unable to reciprocate with a material gift of equal value, that in due course she and her family will have wealth exceeding that of tradesmen like the publishers, and so be able to reciprocate with gifts that are still more valuable.

Borrowing from circulating libraries While some women writers’ books were purchased or provided as supplies by theatre managers or publishers, most books they read were borrowed, some of them from the new, commercial circulating libraries. Raven has declared that ‘there was a library revolution in eighteenth-century England’.24 Recent research has demonstrated that some circulating libraries offered good selections of serious literature, not merely the lightweight contemporary novels in which they were often accused of specialising. Indeed, Cheryl Turner has noted that a subscriber to Bathoe’s Library in 1757 could order Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal or the poems of Ann Finch, and argued that ‘circulating libraries contributed to . . . the gradual identification of a canon of women authors through their holdings and listings of women’s novels, and through their presentation of a wide range of other material to their subscribers’.25 Like the non-commercial civic libraries also newly characteristic of the period, the commercial circulating libraries charged fees that made them inaccessible to some members of the public. Nevertheless, these new libraries did increase access to books, and it was certainly cheaper to pay from roughly 10 shillings to 2 guineas a year to subscribe to a circulating library than to buy every book



what is perhaps the most remarkable letter in this vein, although it requests extra copies of her own books rather than copies of other books she needed:

one read. One of the biggest circulating libraries, Frances Noble’s, in 1759 boasted of containing 20,000 volumes. But most of the circulating libraries were very small, far smaller than, say, the Thrales’ 3000-volume private library. For a writer, who often seeks a book for a very particular purpose rather than for general edification or entertainment, the circulating library could be frustrating. A good complainer, Smith lamented the unavailability of titles she needed, the expense of fees and postage, and the condition of the books she did get from circulating libraries. Writing to her publishers from Exmouth in 1795, she protests that she cannot finish her current manuscript without particular books, but that ‘as to sending to the Libraries at Exeter, nothing can be so fruitless, for after being at great expence for carriage I get only mutilated books or sets so incomplete that what I want to refer to is not to be found’.26 Not living close enough to visit in person also could mean disappointment when a title advertised in the catalogue was nevertheless unavailable. Even in 1794 Bath, with its bigger booksellers and circulating libraries, Smith testifies ‘it is as strange as true, that, having occasion to quote those lines of Pope which begin “Where is the North?” I could not procure at Mr Bull’s or Mr Barratt’s, the Volume of Pope in which they are &, after losing some days, was under the necessity of altering the sentiment & omitting the lines.’27 Surprisingly, it was not until 1807, long after she had established herself as a successful writer of drama and fiction, that Elizabeth Inchbald subscribed to a circulating library for the first time. She was a very successful dramatist, but of humble origin and adept at living frugally. She appreciated the economy and the convenience of the circulating library: ‘I began now for the sake of reading Marmontel. And so, for this trifle of money [8s 6d a quarter], I have had four volumes at a time in my house of choice books that I have read at my leisure.’28 Living in London as a successful dramatist, she also had access to the theatrical libraries. Garrick was an important eighteenth-century bibliophile and established an in-house library for Drury Lane.29

Borrowing from private libraries Raven makes the important point that there was no bright line between public and private libraries. The commercial circulating libraries, he points out, tried to represent themselves as ‘private, select and well-ordered’. On the other hand, as we will see, women writers’ use of other people’s private libraries supports his claim that ‘many apparently private libraries were designed for display and for use by friends and neighbors’. Most successful eighteenth-century women writers had unusual access to good private libraries. Although the poet Elizabeth Rowe came from a dissenting family, early in her residence at Frome she frequently visited at the nearby estate of Henry Thynne, second Viscount Weymouth, at Longleat. There she shared books with the Viscount, his son Henry, who instructed her in French and Italian, his daughter Frances, later the Countess of Hertford, and Bishop Thomas Ken, who lived with the




Thynnes. The non-juror Ken was a learned theologian and poet who brought his own library with him to Longleat. Rowe’s biographer reasonably suggests that Ken’s interest in Jansenism and the Port Royal controversy and his collection not only of Jansenist books but of ‘ascetic and mystical Spanish authors’ ultimately influenced Rowe’s religious poetry.30 Certainly, her exposure to both Anglican piety and Jansenist controversy in this household combined with her natal dissenting Calvinism to make her a more complex and interesting religious poet. Impecunious, Smith depended heavily on the kindness of book-owning strangers. In the absence of family resources, she had recourse over decades to the noble library of the very rich Lord Egremont. George O’Brien Wyndham, third Earl of Egremont, spent over a million pounds patronising artists, including J. M. W. Turner and John Flaxman, as well as Smith. Like many other eighteenth-century owners of private libraries, he felt some obligation to share his books with writers. Smith’s initial connection with him seems to have depended on her brother Nicholas, who in 1789 was rector of Sutton near Petworth, Sussex, the site of Egremont’s estate, and another clergyman, John Upton Tripp, who acted as Egremont’s steward. Smith’s letters show her using Egremont’s library on visits to his estate when she was in the neighbourhood and, on the far more frequent occasions when she was moving about the country from lodging to lodging, requesting that Egremont books be sent to her. Most of Egremont’s books seem to have gone back and forth through the post, thus running some risk of being damaged or lost. In the first surviving letter to Tripp in which she requests particular books, from 1790, she asks for Sir John Fenn’s Original Letters, Written During the Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard II and for Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, a multi-volume work. She states that she would prefer to have Bayle in French rather than in English if the large volumes ‘can be had without any hazard of hurting the Books by their weight’.31 Smith, who could be deeply annoying, at least demonstrated appropriate concern that Egremont’s valuable books not be damaged in transit. Thus, after she has requested and received Egremont’s copies of Arthur Young’s A Six Months Tour through the North of England and his Travels during the Years 1787, 1788, and 1789. Undertaken more Particularly with a View of ascertaining the Cultivation, Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France, she writes: ‘I return Young with a round frock on, for fear his fine coat should suffer from his journey.’ Stanton glosses the ‘round frock’ as ‘an overall worn by children to keep their clothes clean underneath’. Hence, here ‘cloth to protect the book from the rigors of travel’.32 Smith was sensitive to the fact that an owner might do with his own book what he will, but a borrower normally had an obligation to return the volume in the same state in which she received it. Yet writers, as I noted of Piozzi, often wanted to write in and around books, especially books they were using for their own writing. Thus, having borrowed a volume of Hume’s History of



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England from Davies while she was working on an abridgement of English history ‘for the use of Young Ladies’ for a rival publisher, Smith returned the book in frustration, saying, ‘I borrow’d it with the intention of referring to it in an abridged history I am writing, but it is such a nice book & belongs to so high priced a set that I have not ventured to use it with pen & ink about me, in a lodging, least it should be damaged’.33

Family libraries Family libraries were usually more convenient and reliable sources of books for women writers than the libraries of unrelated benefactors like Lord Egremont. Jane Austen could read in her father’s library, possessed of about 500 books in 1801, as well as in her brother’s library.34 Still more fortunate, Frances Burney grew up and was long resident in the household of her father, the musician and musicologist, Charles Burney. Charles was not a rich man, but he was a working scholar and a bibliophile. As a leading musician and musicologist, he received gifts of books, sometimes in exchange for books of his own authorship, sometimes as presentation copies from admirers. By 1798, his collection was estimated at 20,000 volumes35 – the size of one of the largest circulating libraries. Frances’s extensive journals show her using her father’s books.36 While emphasising music, Charles Burney’s library, like most gentlemen’s libraries, also offered poetry, history, travel and other belles lettres, including examples of the ‘life writing’ at which Frances eventually excelled. Charles, for example, owned a complete set of Alexander Pope’s works. In her teens Frances read Pope’s letters with rapture: every Line I read, raises his Character higher in [m]y estimation . . . [I] dare not begin mention his [lo]ng friendship with the admirable [S]wift, because I shall not know where [to] stop; for the attachment of such [em]inent men to one another, has [som]thing in it, almost awes me – & [at] the same time, inexpressibly delights [me.]37 In her wonderfully learned book Women’s Reading in Britain, Jacqueline Pearson focuses on the representation of women’s reading in novels, pointing out that fictional family libraries ‘tended to be seen as a male space’. She notes, among others, the examples of Mr Bennet’s library in Pride and Prejudice and of Doriforth’s library in Inchbald’s Simple Story, the latter library also strongly serving as a figure of ‘patriarchal power’.38 In the families from which women writers typically emerged, however, literary women seem generally to have been welcomed users of the family library. This was especially true of the libraries in families where literature was in some sense the family business. There are, of course, important differences between being dependent on a library collected by someone else and one collected according to your own interests and needs. Most important private libraries, including Lord Egremont’s




and Charles Burney’s, contained large numbers of books in Latin, a language many women writers could not read. In those rare cases where women writers had the resources to build their own collections and in which some record of them has survived, we find more books by women than would be found in a typical gentleman’s library. Elizabeth Tollet, a learned poet who could read Latin, had Latin books and a fine collection of English poetry, including the Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. However, she also had titles rarely encountered in gentleman’s libraries, including a 1716 edition of Rachel Speght’s 1617 feminist tract, a set of six tracts bound as The Freedom of the Fair Sex Asserted and Jane Brereton’s 1744 Poems.39 Piozzi’s library contained Mary Astell’s The Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England, Katherine Philips’ 1678 Poems, Lady Rachel Russell’s Letters, Ann Dacier’s editions of the classics, George Ballard’s Memoirs of the Celebrated Ladies of England, a 1778 edition of Montagu’s Embassy Letters, a five-volume 1803 edition of Montagu’s Works and Catharine Macaulay’s History of England, as well as many books by her bluestocking contemporaries and turn-of-the century women writers, including Helen Maria Williams and Ann Radcliffe. Thrale Piozzi and Elizabeth Montagu both made their large private libraries available to selected other women writers, and so increased the circulation of books by women among women writers.

Borrowing and sharing networks Most women writers developed networks of people reaching beyond their immediate families, friends and colleagues from whom they borrowed and with whom they shared books. As recent scholarship on the history of reading has shown, reading aloud in groups was a common and important practice for most eighteenth-century readers. It was also important to women writers, serving to replace some of the school literary education from which women were excluded and prompting substantive literary discussion. We find group reading aloud in the biographies of writers ranging from Inchbald, whose farming family read plays aloud at home when she was a girl; through Austen’s clerical family; to Elizabeth Carter, who participated in regular readings at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s; and Burney and Queen Charlotte reading aloud at court. Burney, who several times wrote that she preferred reading aloud to conversation, copiously documents this practice of reading aloud in groups. We see her, for example, in 1784 visiting her friends Mr and Mrs William Locke at Norberry Park, delightedly listening to Mrs Locke read Madame de Sévigné’s letters, and in turn reading aloud a volume of Captain Cook’s Voyages, probably from copies belonging to the Lockes.40 Writers involved with circles of other writers often heard authors read their own works, sometimes from manuscript, presumably gaining additional insight into the work. However, a disadvantage of access to books when someone else was the reader was that the reader might be inept or feel obliged to censor the work



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being read. It was, after all, the practice of reading aloud in family circles that inspired Henrietta Maria Bowdler and Thomas Bowdler to produce their once popular, and now infamous, Family Shakespeare, first published in 1807.41 Burney, typically if disappointingly, in 1773 reports being pleased that when her brother-in-law Martin Rishton read aloud to her and other family members from Spenser’s Fairie Queene, he omitted the indecent parts: ‘he is extremely delicate, omitting whatever, to the Poet’s great disgrace, has crept in that is improper for a Woman’s Ear.’42 Bluestocking sociability importantly featured exchanging books, reading aloud from books and discussing them in conversation and correspondence. Often to suggest sharing a particular book entailed encouraging a friend to adopt and develop an ideological or literary perspective that the lender aimed to promote. This was equally true for the pious and learned books that bluestockings like Carter, Catherine Talbot and Elizabeth Montagu exchanged, and for the radical books Wollstonecraft or Inchbald shared in their circle including William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft. Social networks among likeminded writers facilitated writers acquiring books useful to them in writing their own. For example, Talbot sends Carter the Bishop of Norwich’s volumes of Lipsius and Gattaker on Stoic philosophy to help with her translation of Epictetus, ‘as he thinks there is the best account given in them of any he has anywhere met with’.43 Lending and borrowing books was a key practice different literary circles used to construct and to develop themselves.

Gifts Loans and outright gifts of books have much in common – especially their importance in helping to construct literary and ideological circles – but there are also some dynamics peculiar to gifts of books to writers. Women writers who eschewed anonymity and published under their own names were naturally more likely to attract gifts from a wider circle of benefactors. Indeed, consideration of this adds to our appreciation of the price paid by women writers, including Austen, who clung to total or partial anonymity. When we investigate the giving of books as gifts to women writers we discover the kinds of complex systems of reciprocal relationships that fascinated Marcel Mauss. Sometimes gifts from richer donors to poorer recipients helped establish patronage relationships. However, as authors (and others) increasingly aspired to economic independence and grew resentful of traditional deference, such relationships, while often vital to an author’s success, could become tense, on occasion even explosive, as they did in the now infamous and much debated relationship between Hannah More and Ann Yearsley.44 Things were perhaps most likely to go well when the donor and author had a common ideological agenda that they could understand themselves to be forwarding collectively. A good example here is the exceptionally valuable




gifts Thomas Hollis made to Catharine Macaulay. Macaulay came from a City banking family, was reasonably well off and lived prudently. Nevertheless, the research goals she set for her History of England required her to consult a very large number of books, seventeenth-century political pamphlets and manuscripts – far more than she could have purchased. Indeed, Macaulay made use of the new British Library and may well have been the first woman scholar to do so. After Macaulay published the first of the eight volumes of her History in 1765, the wealthy Thomas Hollis, who shared her radical politics, became an important admirer and patron of her work. He had been collecting books, tracts and medals, as he explained, ‘for the purpose of illustrating and upholding liberty, and preserving the memory of its champions, to render tyranny and its abettors odious’.45 It was Hollis who was later ‘largely responsible’ for the presentation of the Thomason collection of Civil War tracts to the British Museum. In March 1765, Hollis bought 145 titles from the library of Dr Leatherland and gave them to Macaulay. The following year he bought 30 more civil war tracts and also made her a present of those. Showing unusual and progressive tact, he made both these gifts anonymously.46 Macaulay, however, was well aware of his admiration and general support of her work, and on other occasions borrowed from his library. She reciprocated by sending him a presentation copy of her history and by publicly acknowledging his assistance. Eventually, Macaulay’s own library contained nearly 5000 tracts and sermons.47 A particularly plangent set of gifts to a woman writer were given to the Afro-American Phillis Wheatley in 1773 when, still a slave, she visited England and published her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Granville Sharp, a leading abolitionist, showed her some of the London sights and presented her with a copy of his Remarks on Several Very Important Prophecies, in Five Parts.48 William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, Secretary of State for North America, to whom Wheatley had written a poem after the repeal of the Stamp Act, gave her a present of 5 guineas and recommended she ‘get the whole of Mr. Pope’s Works’. She did, and also bought Hudibras, Don Quixote and Gay’s Fables. Brooke Watson, former Lord Mayor of London, gave her a handsome 1770 Glasgow folio edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Conscious that as a slave her legal title to these gifts was tenuous, in the autumn of 1773 after she had returned to Boston and her manumission papers had been prepared, Wheatley wrote, ‘The instrument is drawn, so as to secure me and my property from the hands of the Executors . . . of my master; & secure whatsoever Should be given me as my Own.’49 She seems to have kept these books for the rest of her brief life, but after her death, according to a manuscript note in her copy of Paradise Lost, that book ‘was sold in payment of her husband’s debts’.50 Successful and publicly known women writers, like similar male writers, often received presentation copies of other people’s books as gifts. Many presentation copies to women writers survive. As it does today, an author’s gift



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of a presentation copy of his work typically comes bearing a complex set of hopes, if not necessarily expectations. The author typically hopes the recipient will read the book, like it, praise it publicly (thus adding the lustre of her name to its reputation) and, ideally, from that moment on, become a patron of the donor. Women writers who were also rich naturally attracted larger numbers of hopeful authors. Lady Mary Chudleigh received a presentation copy of Elizabeth Thomas’s Poems. Thomas, who accompanied the gift with a note urging Lady Chudleigh to continue her struggle to deliver the female sex ‘from the Insufferable Insolence of our Enemies’, was hoping to form a united feminist front with Chudleigh as well as seeking a patron.51 The Countess of Huntingdon, an early supporter of abolition, permitted Wheatley to dedicate her Poems to her and, presumably, got a presentation copy in return. Elizabeth Montagu, the enormously rich Queen of the Bluestockings, got a presentation copy of Robert Dodsley’s poem Melpomene. Dodsley, rising from footman, to bookseller, author and publisher, sent his book with a note declaring, ‘I am very sensible how much its being countenanced by a Person of Your acknowledged Tast, must tend to give a favourable impression of its Merit to others’.52 Sometimes, a presentation copy honoured an established relationship between the donor and the donee. Thus John Locke gave Damaris Masham a presentation copy of his Essay on Human Understanding.53 Isaac Watts, a lifelong friend of Rowe who worked to advance ideals similar to her own in religion and poetry, regularly presented her with copies of each of his many publications. Samuel Johnson, who lived with the Thrales during a difficult period in his life, gave Hester Thrale a presentation copy of his Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, handsomely bound with a broad border of gold.54 Books that came from a more established writer to a less famous one were especially treasured. Thus one of Burney’s favourite books was a copy of a volume of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, which Johnson, who was as fond of Burney as a doting grandfather, gave her on its publication. Since by the age of Johnson some authors, notably Johnson himself, had become a new kind of author/patron, presentation copies from one writer to another are a particularly interesting subset in this period. When a writer presented a new work to another writer, the donee could reciprocate by sending a volume of his or her own in exchange. This might be a sweet and tactful gesture, welcoming a newer writer into a community of writers, as well as making a personal gift. I think this was the case in an exchange between Hannah More and Garrick. The young More dedicated her poems Sir Eldred of the Bower and the Bleeding Rock (1775) to Garrick and gave him a presentation copy. Garrick, in 1775 renowned and on the brink of retirement, was already a patron and older friend of More. Within days he replied with presentation copies of his farces May Day; or, The Little Gipsy and The Theatrical Candidate. He accompanied his gift with a self-deprecating note: ‘I have two little performances for You which are not worth Your Acceptance – I am oblig’d




to write for us because other people will not . . . – the one is a great favourite, & the other has answer’d the End of writing it.’55 Authors’ neediness, then as now, knowing no bounds, some presentation copies came with awkward demands. Both More and Garrick were flummoxed by gifts to each of them from Joseph Tucker, Doctor of Divinity, Dean of Gloucester, and More’s friend, of his privately printed The Notions of Mr. Locke and His Followers Considered and Examined. Dr Tucker asked both of them to record their comments about his arguments in the margins of the volumes, presumably as a basis for further discussion. Amazingly, the busy Garrick actually read the book. However, he wrote to More, ‘I have read it with care, and like it, some few trifling matters excepted; but I cannot be conceited enough to make my objections in the margin of his book. What shall I do? You are, I suppose in the same predicament.’ More, who even as young woman was more interested in theology and philosophy than Garrick, replied, ‘If you, my dear Sir, are at a loss about marginal notes in the Dean of Gloucester’s Book, what must I be? I have told him about your delicacy and your scruples, and he will be greatly hurt and disappointed, if you do not criticize.’56 Another special form of gift was inheritance. This was, after all, the way most valuable property was acquired in the eighteenth century. Since books were chattel property, not real property, they were not subject to primogeniture or likely to be entailed on the male line of the family. Many bibliophiles gave careful thought to the testamentary disposition of their books, making specific bequests of individual titles or groups of titles. Here, despite the inapplicability of primogeniture, we see that the inheritance of books was usually understood as gendered. One of the obvious ways in which this made some sense was that upper-class men had studied Latin and were likely to have Latin books in their libraries, whereas most upper-class women, even those like Austen who became writers, did not read Latin. By analogy to the old rule of paraphernalia, according to which women’s jewels and dresses descended in the female line, Latin books might, by the same logic, descend in the male line. The testamentary disposition of books by two noted eighteenth-century writers and bibliophiles, John Locke and Charles Burney, illuminates this gendered logic. Locke prepared a catalogue of the over 3000 books at one time or another in his own library; he never married and had no children. From 1691 until his death in 1704, he lived as a paying guest with his friend Damaris Masham and her husband, bringing most of his library with him to their estate. Masham, who first met Locke in 1682, was a supporter of his philosophical views and a dedicated rationalist; she published philosophical works in 1696 and 1700. Her father was the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. When he died in 1688, his library was sold at auction, although he did leave some or all of his manuscripts to Damaris. While living at Oates with the Mashams, Locke took an interest in the education of their son, Francis. In his will, Locke gave detailed attention to the disposition of his



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books. A few friends received bequests of particular titles, gifts nicely designed to reflect Locke’s recognition of their individual intellectual and scholarly interests and to provide them with personal remembrances of the philosopher. To Damaris, he gave ‘my ruby ring and my diamond ring with one stone and any four folios eight quartos and twenty books of less volume which she shall choose out of the books in my Library not otherwise disposed of by name’.57 The bulk of the library, however, over 2000 books, he divided between his cousin and executor Peter King and young Francis Masham, should he reach the age of 21, providing that during Francis’s minority the books were to remain in Damaris’s custody, but if Francis died before reaching 21, his share of the library was also to go to Peter King. (Francis did survive to inherit his half of the Locke’s books.) Damaris thus got what contemporary lawyers might have described as an estate for a term of years in half of Locke’s library. Locke honoured Masham’s intellectual abilities and her friendship with him in many ways, yet he thought it appropriate to devise the ultimate ownership of the bulk of his library to a male cousin and to the boy Francis rather than to a woman philosopher. Charles Burney also made elaborate provisions for his library in his will. After making a series of bequests of particular books, he devised that the specialist music library should be sold to the new British Museum, where it became the core of that library’s music collection. Unusually, Charles made daughters rather than sons the residuary legatees and principal beneficiaries of his will. His eldest son James, who had abandoned his wife to live for five years in an incestuous relationship with his half-sister Sarah, was not favoured. Charles, the second son, had disgraced himself by stealing books when he was at Cambridge University and had been expelled, but by the time of his father’s death he was a rehabilitated classical scholar. To him, his father bequeathed £200 and ‘all such Classics and splendid editions of learned and scientific books of which he is not already in possession as are in the glazed book-case standing in the parlour’ of the Chelsea apartment.58 To Sarah, the daughter guilty of incest and herself a minor novelist, went all the French books ‘in the Glass Book Case of [CB’s] Parlour marked E, except the works of Voltaire many of which are unfit for the perusal of Females, and Bolingbrokes Philosophical works’.59 (While ladies generally did not learn Latin, they did learn French.) The remaining bulk of the general library Burney directed to be sold at auction. The total sum earned from the sale of the various parts of his library was £2353, the proceeds being invested in government securities for the benefit of Frances, at this point the married Madame D’Arblay, and her sister Esther.60 Frances was grateful for her father’s bequest and thought she could use the money, yet it is worth observing that even a father like Charles, who doted on his author daughter and who corresponded with her about books for many decades, did not think it appropriate to devise the books to her. On the other hand, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu devised her books to her daughter, not to her badly behaved son.




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The subject of how women writers got the books they read has yet to be thoroughly considered, but I hope I have demonstrated that it is worth more inquiry. In this initial overview, I have emphasised women writers’ getting books as professional supplies from publishers and theatre managers and their receiving presentation copies of the works of other writers, because these show the increasing importance and power of women writers in the literary system. One might say that in this period two very different paradigms were available as models for relationships between givers and receivers: the older paradigm of a patronage relationship, in which the giver was a superior and the recipient inferior, and a newer paradigm of the giver and receiver as friends and colleagues engaged in a common project of cultural work. The relationship between the Earl of Egremont and Smith is an example of the patronage paradigm and the relationship between Godwin and Inchbald an example of the collegial paradigm. Yet, as I trust we have seen from the richness of the examples, a description in terms of these two paradigms would be far too crude to capture the complexities and ambiguities of phenomena like Elizabeth Montagu’s giving and receiving books in her bluestocking circle or Smith’s manipulative appeals to her publishers. I have left out other topics that might have been included. For instance, it would be worthwhile to consider women writers’ subscribing to books as a special form of purchase; and it would be fascinating to consider the gifts of books men made to women writers they were courting or trying to seduce. Fiction suggests that amorous men gave their mistresses copies of Ovid, or in the later eighteenth century, Rousseau, yet – my preliminary investigation reveals – successful lovers of women writers were more likely to give them books that recognised their intellectual interests, a book like Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding, which Richard Gwinnett gave Elizabeth Thomas, or, better yet, Astell’s Serious Proposal, which he also gave her.61 What book could a potential lover have given Jane Austen that might have increased his chance of success? Heady as the apparent impersonality and irresponsibility of access to books in a great public library can be, there is also something deeply moving about a physical book embedded in a personal relationship. It is easy to understand why Burney treasured her presentation copies of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and her father’s History of Music, and why General D’Arblay made progress in her affections by giving her a copy of his own essay on the trial of Louis XVI; or why Amy Lowell bought Piozzi’s copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. I too have felt a thrill and a kind of connection in examining Thrale’s Boswell and Wheatley’s Paradise Lost at the Houghton Library. It is a long way from the free access for all of the New York Public Library to the intimacy of these unique books. Yet, no longer the dazzled child in the public library, I now understand that whenever books are offered to readers they are offered as part of a relationship.



Conclusion


1 Thomas Kelly, Early Public Libraries: A History of Public Libraries in Great Britain before 1850 ([London]: Library Association, 1966), pp. 104–9. 2 Kelly, p. 157. 3 Lady Mary [Walker] Hamilton, Munster Village (London and New York: Pandora, 1987), p. 22. 4 Hamilton, p. 23. 5 Hugh Amory, ‘Introduction’ to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu catalogue, in Sale Catalogues of Libraries of Eminent Persons, ed. A. N. L. Munby et al., 12 vols. (London: Mansell with Sotheby Parke Bernet Publications, 1971–75), VII, p. 52. 6 Hester Thrale Piozzi, Thraliana; the Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776–1809, 2 vols., ed. Katherine C. Balderston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942), II, p. 780. 7 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Comprehending an Account of his Studies, and Numerous Works, 8th edition, 4 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1812), I, p. 476. Piozzi’s copy, Houghton Library, Lowell *EC75B6578.791C. Edward G. Fletcher has published Piozzi’s marginalia from two of her copies of Boswell’s Life in The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. by James Boswell, Esq. With Marginal Comments and Markings from Two Copies edited by Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, 3 vols. (London: For the Limited Editions Club at Cuwen Press, 1938). 8 Piozzi copy of Boswell’s Life, III, p. 476. 9 Fletcher, ‘Preface’, I:[v]. 10 James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 57–8. 11 Piozzi’s copy of Boswell’s Life, II, p. 33. 12 Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 13 The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith, ed. Judith Philips Stanton (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2003). 14 Mary Wollstonecraft to Everina Wollstonecraft, 12 February 17[87], The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 105, 152. 15 On girls’ schools, see Susan Skedd, ‘Women’s Teaching and the Expansion of Girls’ Schooling in England, c. 1760–1820’, in Genders in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations, and Responsibilities (London: Longman, 1997), pp. 101–25. 16 The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, ed. James Boaden, 2 vols. (London, 1831–32), I, pp. 128, 299–300. 17 Annibel Jenkins, I’ll Tell You What: The Life of Elizabeth Inchbald (Lexington, KY; University Press of Kentucky, 2003), pp. 241–2, 272, 253, 220. 18 Jenkins, p. 454. One of Wollstonecraft’s letters to Johnson also seems to suggest that she returned review copies to him after she had written the reviews. 19 The receipt is noted in Raven, p. 59. The Discovery was the novel Mrs Woodfin published that year. 20 Smith to Thomas Cadell, Jr., and William Davies, 29 January 1798, p. 310. 21 Smith to William Davies, 3 January 1798, p. [304]. 22 Karen O’Brien, ‘The History Market in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays, ed. Isabel Rivers (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001), pp. 105–33.



Notes

23 Smith to [William Davies], 13 November 1793, p. 87. 24 James Raven, ‘From Promotion to Proscription: Arrangements for Reading and Eighteenth-Century Libraries’, in The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, ed. James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 175. 25 Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 135. 26 Smith to Thomas Cadell, Jr., and William Davies, 3 September [17]95, p. 209. 27 Smith to Thomas Cadell, Jr., and William Davies, 15 September 1794, p. [160]. 28 Jenkins, p. 486. 29 There is an excellent discussion of Garrick as a bibliophile and facilitator of scholarship in George Winchester Stone, Jr. and George M. Kahrl, David Garrick: A Critical Biography (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 165–99. 30 Henry F. Stecher, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, The Poetess of Frome: A Study in EighteenthCentury English Pietism (Berne and Frankfurt: Herbert Lang and Peter Lang, 1973), p. 68. 31 Smith to James Upton Tripp, 26 March 1790, p. 26. 32 Smith to James Upton Tripp, 31 October [17]93, pp. [84], 85, n1. 33 Smith to William Davies, 18 February 1802, p. 403. 34 David Selwyn, Jane Austen and Leisure (London: Hambledon Press, 1999), p. 176. See also, D. J. Gilson, ‘Jane Austen’s Books’, Book Collector, 23 (1974): 27–39. 35 Jacqueline Pearson, Women’s Reading in Britain, 1750–1835: A Dangerous Recreation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 130. At his death, Burney’s library of books on music was sold, as he desired, to the British Museum for £283, his collection of music sold for £686 and his ‘Miscellaneous Library’ fetched £1414 at auction. See also Roger Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 476. 36 Frances Burney, The Early Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide et al., 4 vols. (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queens’s University Press, 1988–2003), I, pp. 176–7. 37 Burney, Early Journals, I, pp. 179–80. 38 Pearson, p. 152. 39 Sir Walter Blount, A Catalogue of the Betley Hall Library formed during the Eighteenth Century by Elizabeth Tollet (1694–1754), Poetess, and George Tollet (1725–1774), and sold by Sir Walter Blount, bart. [London, 1923]. 40 Burney, Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay (1778–1840), ed. Charlotte Barrett, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1904), II, p. 265. 41 Noel Perrin, Dr Bowdler’s Legacy: A History of Expurgated Books in England and America (Boston: David R. Godine, 1992), pp. 60–86. 42 Burney, Early Journals, 1: 299. 43 Talbot to Carter, 11 January 1755, A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot From the Year 1741 to 1770, 4 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1975; reprint of 1809), I, p. 182. 44 Good accounts of this vexed relationship may be found in Patricia Demers, ‘“For Mine’s a Stubborn and a Savage Will”: “Lactilla” (Ann Yearsley) and “Stella” (Hannah More) Reconsidered’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 56 (1993): 135–50; Mary Waldron, The Life and Writings of Ann Yearsley, 1758–1806 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996); and Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).



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45 Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catharine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 166. 46 Hill, p. 168. See also Bridget and Christopher Hill, ‘Catharine Macaulay’s History and her Catalogue of Tracts’, Seventeenth Century, 8 (1993): 269–85. 47 Hill, p. 48. 48 The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 197. Mason also notes two volumes of the Works of Shenstone, now in the Schomburg Center, New York, given to Wheatley by the American Mary Eveleigh. 49 Wheatley, p. 197. 50 This book is now in the Houghton Library. 14486.7.14F*. 51 Richard Gwinnett and Elizabeth Thomas, Pylades and Corinna: or, Memoirs of the Lives, Amours, and Writings of Richard Gwinnett, Esq. and Mrs. Eliza Thomas . . . Consisting of Letters, and other Misc. Pieces, in Prose and Verse, which passed between them during a Courtship of above 16 years . . . . To which is prefixed, The Life of Corinna, Written by Herself, 2 vols. (London, 1731–32), p. 331. Vol. 2 published as The Honourable Lovers. 52 The Correspondence of Robert Dodsley, 1733–1764, ed. James E. Tierney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 303. Montagu had sent him a letter praising Melepomene. In addition to countenancing his tragedy, Montagu might be a lucrative customer for Dodsley as bookseller. 53 John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke, 2nd edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 60. 54 Sale Catalogues, V: 553, No. 631. 55 Garrick to More, 19 December [1775], The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), III, p. 1246. On the other hand, an author donee who wished to evade becoming a patron of another writer who had bestowed a presentation copy, might avoid doing so and still conform to the rules of politeness and reciprocity by simply returning a thank you note and a book of his of her own. 56 More to Garrick [after 14 September 1778], Letters, III: 1246. 57 The Correspondence of John Locke, ed. E. S. DeBeer, 8 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), VIII, p. 421. 58 The Journals and Letters of Fanny Burney (Madame D’Arblay), ed. Joyce Hemlow et al., 10 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972–82), VII, pp. 325, n6, 327, n11. The disposition of the estate and the family’s reactions can be followed in this volume in pp. 324–516; the editors, Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom, offer helpful notes. 59 Burney, Journals and Letters, VII, p. 327, n11. Among the works of Voltaire in Charles’ library he must have thought unfit for ladies was the Pucelle d’Orléans, a long ribald and irreligious verse version of the adventures of Joan of Arc. 60 Burney, Journals and Letters, VII: 326, n10. 61 Gwinnet and Thomas, Pylades and Corinna, Letter 2, p. 83.







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Ribeiro, Aileen. A Visual History of Costume: The Eighteenth Century. London: Batsford, 1983. Rivers, Isabel, ed. Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England: New Essays. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2001. Roche, Daniel. The Culture of Clothing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Rose, Mary B., ed. The Lancashire Cotton Industry: A History since 1700. Preston: Lancashire County Books, 1996. Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Sculptors. G. K. Hall: Boston, 1990. Scarisbrick, Diana. Jewellery in Britain, 1066–1837. Norwick: Michael Russell, 1994. Solkin, David, ed. Art on the Line: the Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780–1836. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Sellers, Charles Coleman. Patience Wright: American Artist and Spy in George III’s London. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976. Snodin, Michael and John Styles. Design and the Decorative Arts, Britian, 1500–1900. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 2001. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Gossip. New York: Knopf, 1985. Staves, Susan. Married Women’s Separate Property in England 1660–1833. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Stott, Anne. Hannah More: The First Victorian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Todd, Janet. The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing an Fiction, 1660–1800. London: Virago Press, 1989. Tozer, Jane and Sarah Levitt, Fabric of Society: A Century of People and their Clothes, 1770–1870. Cambridge: L. Ashley, 1983. Townsend, Dabney, ed. Eighteenth-Century British Aesthetics. Amityville: Baywood, 1999. Turner, Cheryl. Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Van der Kiste, John. The Georgian Princesses. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000. Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Walpole, Horace. Anecdotes of Painting in England, with some Account of the Principal Artists, ed. Ralph N. Wornum. 4 vols. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Walpole, Horace. The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. Humphrey Milford. 48 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press/London: Oxford University Press, 1937–83. Warwick. Alexandra, and Dani Cavallaro, eds. Fashioning the Frame: Boundaries, Dress and the Body. Oxford: Berg, 1998. Weiner, Annette B. and Jane Schneider, eds. Cloth and Human Experience. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Winckelmann: Writings on Art, ed. David Irwin. London: Phaidon, 1972. Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slaves in England and America. New York: Routledge, 2000. Wood, Marcus. Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Yarrington, Alison and Kelvin Everest, eds. Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.



216 Select Bibliography

abolition movement, 151–2 Addison, Joseph, 23 Adolf, Wilhelm, 185 aesthetics, 138–41 Chinese versus British, 5, 123, 124–5, 137–41 gendering of, 103, 104, 105–6 Alexander I (Tsar of Russia), 73, 78, 81 Anderson, Benedict, 186–7 Anderson, Misty, 57–8 Andras, Catherine, 96, 98 Anglo-German exchange, 176–89 Anne (Queen of England), 21, 102n38 Anna Amalia of Sachsen-WeimarEisenach, 176, 180, 182, 183 library of, 183–4 Apollo (sculpture), 91, 92, 100n15, 106 Armstrong, Nancy, 55 Arnold, Janet, 37 artist (female), 4, 71, 104, 106–7, 110–13 Art Journal, The, 92 Asam, Johanna Nepomucena, 93 Astell, Mary, 198, 202, 208 Atlantis Chinensis, 125 Austen, Jane, 201, 202 Bachelard, Gaston, 62–3 Bacon, John, 90 Baines, Edward, 39 Bal, Mieke, 17 Banks, Sir Joseph, 121 Banks, Thomas, 90 Barrell, John, 105 Bateo, Pompeo, 75 Beauclerk, Lady Diana, 91, 107 Behn, Aphra, 104, 151 Belliard, Charles, 16 Bell’s British Theatre, 196 Berger, Joachim, 182 Berkeley, Elizabeth, 87 Berlin Academy of Arts, 71 Bermingham, Ann, 105 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 106 Bishop, Revd Samuel, 23 Blackstone, William, 19

Blake, William, 21 Blunt, Robert, 36 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 88 bonnets (see hats) books borrowing and sharing, 202–3 as cosmopolitan object, 176–91 as gifts, 203–7 inheritance of, 206–7 as material object, 3, 6 as professional supplies, 195–8 purchase of, 195 see also Libraries Boswell, James, 193–4, 208 Boulton, Matthew, 12 Boucher, François, 123 Bourdieu, Pierre, 67n7, 119 Bouverie, Elizabeth, 151 Bowdler, Henrietta and Thomas, 203 Boyle, Grace, 11 Bray, Thomas, 192 Brenna, Vincenzo, 78 Brereton, Jane, 202 Brewer, John, 2 British Library, 192 Brown, Bill, 54 Brückmann, Patricia, 165–6 Bruun-Neergaard, Tønnes Christian, 88 Bullock, Sybella, 88 Burke, Edmund, 65, 106 Burney, Charles, 201–2, 207, 210n35 Burney, Edward Francisco, 38, 38 Burney, Frances, 1, 201, 202, 207 Camilla, 21 Evelina, 54, 55–7, 58, 59–60, 66 The Wanderer, 54, 55, 57, 58–9, 60–1, 62–6 Burney, Sarah, 207 Butler, Judith, 53 Cadell, Thomas, 196–8 Cameron, Charles, 73, 74–5 Canova, Antonio, 107 Captain Cook’s Voyages, 130 Caroline of Ansbach, 181 217



Index

Carter, Elizabeth, 202, 203 Catherine the Great, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 88 Centlivre, Susan, 108, 109, 112 Chard, Chloe, 110 Charlemont, Lord, 17 Charles II (King of Spain), 88 Charlotte, (Queen of England), 14, 22, 25, 26, 91, 96, 178 Charpentier, Julie, 88, 89, 98 Chevalier du Courday, 75 China trade, 5, 119, 120, 128, 135–45 chinoiserie, 122–4, 126–7, 128 Chudleigh, Lady Mary, 205 Churchill, Sarah (Duchess of Marlborough), 21, 22 clothing, 37–8, 42–3, 54, 163–4, 167–73 see also fashion Coade, Eleanor, 90–1, 92 collecting, 103, 105 Colley, Linda, 151 Collot, Marie-Anne, 80–1, 87, 88, 90, 92, 98 Compton, Lady Anne, 15 Compton, Lady Charlotte, 15 Conboy, Sheila C., 165 Connoisseur, The, 108 connoisseurship, 103, 105, 107–8, 110, 112 fraudulent, 103, 108, 109 Conolly, [John ?], 108 consumption, histories of, 2, 3, 6 rise of, 32–3, 36, 37, 52–3, 155–6, 164 Corfield, Penelope J., 67n9 cosmopolitanism, 176–7, 183, 184, 186–7, 188–9 Cosway, Maria, 105, 110 Cosway, Richard, 87, 105 Cottage Comforts, 42 cotton, 33, 39–40, 43, 46 Cowley, Hannah, 4, 103–13 The Belle’s Stratagem, 109 A Bold Stroke for a Husband, 109 The Maid of Aragon, 109 The Runaway, 57 The Town Before You, 103, 104, 105–6, 110–13 Who’s the Dupe, 109 The World as it Goes, 103, 108, 109, 112

Critical Review, 167 Corker, John Wilson, 57 Cudworth, Ralph, 206 cultural translation, 135, 145 Cunningham, Allan, 86, 90, 106 Cunnington, Cecil Willet, 33 Cunnington, Phillis, 33 Dabydeen, David, 159n17 Dacier, Ann, 202 Daily Advertiser, The, 166 Daily Courant, The, 96 Damer, Anne, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 98, 100n21, 103, 106, 107 Darwin, Erasmus, 98 Davies, William, 196–8, 201 Defoe, Daniel, 120 Moll Flanders, 13 Delaney, Mary, 21 Deleval, Lady, 16, 19, 29n48 Denman, Maria, 88 Dietrich, Johann Christian, 179 dimity, 33, 40–1, 44 Dodsley, Robert, 205 domestic economy, 41–4 Douglas, Aileen, 171 Doy, Gen, 71 Drury Lane Theatre, 91, 99n13 East India Company, 120, 125 Ebert, Johann Arnold, 185 Echsenburg, Johann Joachim, 185 Edgeworth, Maria, 6 The Absentee, 127–8 Belinda, 24 Eduin, Marie-Anne, 87 Egremont, Lord, 200, 201, 208 Elfenbein, Andrew, 106 embroidery, 35–6 Engel, Barbara Alpern, 81 Ersterhammer, Angela, 67n6 Evelyn, John, 11 Fabian, Bernhard, 178, 187 Falconet, Etienne-Maurice, 80 Fan, The, 168, 173 fans, 167–8 see also Pamela fan fashion and subject formation, 156–8, 168–9



218 Index

as form of slavery, 5, 147, 148–51, 154–5 Fedorovna, Maria (Empress of Russia), 4, 71–82, 72, 79, 80 as artist, 72–3, 77–8, 81, 82 and charities, 81–2 as patron, 72, 74–6, 82, 83n15 and Pavlovsk, 71, 73, 74, 75–6, 77 relationship with children, 78–9 Fenn, Sir John, 200 Fielding, Henry, 167 Shamela, 167, 168, 170 Tom Jones, 168 Fletcher, Loraine, 196 Flint, Christopher, 171 Foote, Samuel, 108 Fothergill, Dr John, 24 Frances Stuart (Duchess of Richmond and Lennox), 96, 97 Franklin, Benjamin, 95 Frederick the Great, 179, 180, 182, 183, 186 Freval, Jean Baptiste de, 169 Fysh, Stephanie, 166–7, 168, 175 Gallery of Costume (Manchester), 33 Gallery of Fashion, The, 59, 60, 63, 68n23, 68n24, 68n28 Gamble, Mrs, 166 gambling, 18–19 Gambs, Heinrich, 76, 78 Garrick, David, 58, 195–6, 205–6 Gazley, Martha, 94 Genlis, Madame de, 196 George I (King of England), 176 George II (King of England), 176, 184 George III (King of England), 14, 26, 103, 176, 184 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, 12, 14, 19 The Sylph, 19–20 gift economy, 198 Gilpin, William, 129 Gisborne, Thomas, 197 Gnedich, Nikolai, 77 Goldsmith, Mrs, 96, 97, 98, 102n38 gossip, 142–5 and notions of taste, 143–5 Gothic design, 128–9 Göttingen, University of, 177, 179

Grand Tour, The, 105, 107, 109, 128, 130 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 75 Griffith, Elizabeth, 195 Grimm, Baron von, 78 Grosholtz, Marie (see Tussaud, Madame) Gwilliam, Tassie, 165 Hackert, Philip, 75 Hadfield, Andrew, 126 Hagemann, Friedrich, 76 Hall, Anna Maria, 43 Grandmamma’s Pockets, 32, 35, 43, 44–6 Hamilton, Emma, 96, 105 Hamilton, Jean, 121 Hamilton, Lady Mary (Walker), 193 Hamilton, Sir William, 75, 105, 107 Harris, Thomas, 196 Hartman, Saidiya, 148, 153, 154 hats, 3, 52–66, 67n16 Hayley, William, 108 Hepplewhite, Alice, 40 Hepplewhite, George, 40 Hereford, Lady, 123 Herzog August Bibliotek, 182, 183, 184, 187–8, 189 Hill, Aaron, 163–4 Hogarth, William, 17–18 Holland, Henry, 91 Holland, William, 91 Hosmer, Harriet, 90 Houdon, Jean-Antoine, 75 Humble, Dame Sarah, 14 Imperial Academy of Arts, 71, 76–7, 81, 82 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 196, 198, 201, 202, 208 it-narrative (see object-narrator novel) Jackson, John Baptist, 124–5, 126–7 Jacob, Henri, 75 James II (King of England), 94 Jansenism, 200 Jarvis, Fanny, 6, 31, 33–6, 39, 40, 41, 43, 46 Jerusalem, Johann Friederich, 185, 186–7 jewellery, 3, 11–27 as baptismal gift, 12



Index 219

220 Index

Kames, Lord, 24 Karamzin, Nikolai, 77 Kauffmann, Angelica, 75, 79, 80, 104, 107, 110 Kenney, James, 66 Kerrich, Barbara, 167 Keymer, Thomas, 165, 168 Kleingeld, Pauline, 188 Knapton, George, 25, 29n57 Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 21, 22 Knight, Richard Payne, 107 Kosudu-Warner, Johanna, 120, 124 Küchelbecker, Karl, 74 Kwass, Michael, 53 Lady’s Economical Assistant, The, 41, 42 Lafermière, François-Germain de, 77, 78 Lamm, Placida, 93 Lampi, Johann Baptist, 78 Lavoisier, Jean-Antoine, 21 Leberecht, Karl, 77 Lee, Harriet and Sophia, 195 Legge, William, 204 Leibniz, Göttfried Wilhelm, 181 Le Texier, Anthony, 196 Leven, Countess of, 16 libraries, circulating libraries, 197, 198–9, 201 family libraries, 201–2 Herzog August Bibliotek, 182, 183 in novels, 201 private libraries, 199–201 University of Göttingen Library, 178 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 177–8 Lightfoot, James, 197 Lindenmeyr, Adele, 81 linen, 36, 39 Locke, John, 205, 206–7, 208 Locke, William, 202

London Magazine, The, 95 Longxi, Zhang, 120 Louis XVI (King of France), 75 luxury, 53 Lynch, Deidre, 159n22, 169–70 Macaulay, Catharine, 202, 204 Mackenzie, Althea, 53 Mackie, Erin, 2, 52–3 Manley, Delarivier, 142 Manzolini-Morandi, Anna, 94 marcella (see Marseilles) Marie d’Orléans, 90 Marriage Act, 18–19 Marseilles (or ‘Marcella’ quilting), 44–5, 47 Mary II (Queen of England), 96 Mary of Modena, 94 Masham, Damaris, 205, 206, 206–7 material culture studies, 134 Mauss, Marcel, 203 McGrew, Roderick, 81 McKendrick, Neil, 164 McKillop, Allan, 164 McPherson, David, 40 Mellor, Anne K., 158 Memoirs and Interesting Adventures of an Embroidered Waistcoat, 171–3 Merryfield, Mrs, 26 Michaelangelo, 92 Middleton, Lady, 151 Mills, Mrs, 94 Ming dynasty, 5, 136 Montagu, Elizabeth, 24, 26, 131, 193, 202, 207 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 20, 122–3, 135, 193 Monthly Review, 186 More, Hannah, 2, 5, 104, 148–58, 195, 203, 205–6 ‘The Black Slave Trade’, 148, 149, 152–3 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, 157, 112 ‘The White Slave Trade’, 149–51 Moser, Mary, 107, 110 Mullins, Roscoe, 88–9, 92 Mulready, William, 39 Münchhausen, Gerlach Adolf von, 177, 178



jewellery – continued borrowing and hiring, 21 children’s, 12–13 inheritance of, 14–15 and men, 11 social significance of, 21–3, 24–6 as wedding gift, 14 Johnson, Joseph, 196 Johnson, Samuel, 108 Josef II (Emperor of Austria), 73–4

National Library of Ireland, 192 nationalism, 119, 131, 128–9, 188 Nelson, Lord Horatio, 96 Newton, John, 151 New York Gazette, 94 Nicholas I (Tsar of Russia), 81 Nickel, Terri, 166 Nickolai, Baron Andrei, 74 Noble, Francis, 199 Nollekens, Joseph, 96 object-narrator novel, 169–73 O’Brien, Karen, 197 Old Bailey records, 31, 41 Orientalism, 5, 121, 123, 126, 136 Orr, Clarissa Campbell, 178 Pamela Censured, 164, 171 Pamela fan, 165, 166–9, 174–5n23 ‘Pamela Vogue’, 2–3, 164–73 Park, Suzie, 68 Parker, George, 125 Pasquin, Anthony, 105 Paston, George, 94 Patch, Thomas, 105 Paul I (T sar of Russia), 4, 71, 73, 75 Pavlovsk, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77 Pearce, Susan, 57 Pearson, Jacqueline, 201 Perkins, Pam, 58 per via di levare, 88, 91 Peter the Great (T sar of Russia), 81 Peter III (T sar of Russia), 73 Pfründt, Anna Maria, 88 Philip V (King of Spain), 88 Philips, Katherine, 202 Philippine Charlotte of BraunschweigWolfenbuettel 180, 182, 183–5, 188, 189 cosmopolitanism of, 183–6 private library of, 183, 184, 187 photography, 93 picturesque, 129 Pillement, Jean-Baptiste, 123, 125 Pinchbeck, Christopher, 20 Pinchbeck, Edward, 20 pin-money, 14 Picquet, 18–19 Piozzi, Hester (see also Thrale), 193–5, 197, 202

Plumptre, James, 108 pockets, 3, 6, 31–47, 34, 35, 45 material properties of, 33–6 social uses of, 38–46 symbolical meaning of, 39–46 Pope, Alexander: The Rape of the Lock, 18 Pope Benedict XIV, 94 Porter, David, 128 Porter, Roy, 2 Postlethwaite, Elizabeth, 167 Postman, The, 94 Poussin, Nicholas, 106 Powys, Mrs Phillip Lybbe, 21 Poyntz, Georgiana, 14 Pushkin, Alexander, 77 quakerism, 23–4 Quarterly Review, 57 Raabe, Mechthild, 188 Radcliffe, Ann: Mysteries of Udolpho, 52, 53 Ramsay, James, 151 Treatment of African Slaves, 153 Raven, James, 198, 199 Reni, Guido, 106 reticules, 37 Reuss, Jeremias David, 178 Reveillon, J. B., 125, 126 Reynolds, Joshua, 106, 107, 139, 143 Discourses on Art, 21, 139–41 Rice, Laura, 54 Richardson, Samuel, 163–9 Pamela (1740), 2, 144, 163–71, 172–3 Rivière, Marc Serge, 183 Robert, Hubert, 75 Roche, Daniel, 39 Roentgen, David, 75 Róldan, Luisa, 88, 90, 91, 98 Rossi, Properzia de’, 86 Rowe, Elizabeth, 199 Rowlandson, Thomas, 105 Royal Academy, 103, 105, 113 women’s exclusion from, 71, 106 Royal Society, 134 Rubens, Peter Paul, 27n4106 Russell, Lady Rachel, 202 Sabor, Peter, 165, 168 Said, Edward, 121, 126



Index 221

Salmon, Mrs, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100n21, 102n38 Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, 130, 131 Scarry, Elaine, 61–2 Scheffler, Karl, 92 Schurman, Anna Maria van, 94 sculptor (female), 4, 80–1, 86–98, 106–7, 110 sculpture, 4, 80–1, 86–98, 104, 106, 107, 110, 111, 112–13 gendering of, 88, 89–90, 91–8 see also wax modelling; per via di levare Selo, Tasrskoe, 77 Sévigné, Madam de, 202 Seward, Anna, 197 Shackleton, Elizabeth, 155–6 Siddons, Sarah, 106 Skene, Jane Forbes, 16 slavery, 148–58 Smith, Adam, 24 Smith, Charlotte, 195, 199, 200–1, 208 dealings with publishers, 196–8 Smolny Institute for Gentlewomen, 81 Snodin, Michael, 39 Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, 44 Society of Arts, 88 Society of Antiquaries, 105, 108 Society of Dilletanti, 103, 105, 107 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 64 Sophie Charlotte von Preussen, 180, 181 Sophie of Hannover, Princess, 179, 180, 181 Southerne, Thomas, 151, 153 Southey, Robert, 197 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 66, 142, 144 Spectator, The, 167, 168 Speght, Rachel, 202 Spencer, John, 14 Sprat, Thomas, 134 Stalker, John, 125 Stanton, Judith, 195 Staves, Susan, 127 Stott, Anne, 151–2, 158n3 St Paul, 54–5 St Petersburg, 80, 82 sumptuary laws, demise of, 12 Sunderland, Lady, 21 Swift, Jonathan, 134–5

Talbot, Catherine, 203 taste, 24, 104, 109, 113, 119, 122, 124–5, 132, 136, 138, 139 tea, 136, 142 textile market, 36, 37 Thomas, Elizabeth, 205, 208 Thrale, Hester (see also Piozzi), 199, 205 Times, The, 40 Todd, Janet, 104 Tollet, Elizabeth, 202 Trollope, Anthony, 19 Turner, Cheryl, 198 Turner, James Grantham, 165 Tussaud, Madame, 95–6, 98, 102n39 Vandenhoeck, Abraham, 178 Vandenhoeck, Anna, 178–9, 185, 188 Vandenhoeck publishing house, 178–9, 187, 188–9 Vasari, Giorgio, 86 Vernet, Claude Joseph, 75 Vickery, Amanda, 2, 155–6 Vigée-Lebrun, Elisabeth, 79–80 Villiers, Lady, 21 Viollier, François, 77 Volmer, Annett, 183 Voronikhin, Andrei, 75–6 Wakefield, Priscilla, 92 Walker, A., 26 Walker, Lady Mary (see Hamilton) Wallace, Elizabeth Kowaleski, 2 Waller, Mary, 41 wallpaper, 5, 119–32 Walpole, Horace, 21, 86, 88, 100m21, 105, 106, 129 Warner, William B., 165 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 123 wax modelling, 88, 93, 100n19–20, 107 relationship to other forms of sculpture, 88, 92–3, 107 waxworks shows, 94–6, 101n28 at Westminster Abbey, 96–7 Webster, Thomas, 39 Weekly Entertainer, The, 147 Westminster Abbey, 96–7 Wheatley, Phillis, 204 Wilberforce, William, 151



222 Index

Index 223 Yarrington, Alison, 91 Yearsley, Ann, 203 Young, Arthur, 200 Younge, Elizabeth, 110 Zhukovsky, Vasily, 77 Zoffany, Johann, 105, 107, 110 Zonana, Joyce, 157 Zuber, Jean, 130 Zukin, Sharon, 124



Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, 180, 181–2, 183 William III (King of England), 96 Williams, Hannah Maria, 202 Winckelmann, J. J., 106 Wolcot, John (Peter Pindar), 110 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 195 Woman of Fashion, The, 20 Wood, Marcus, 148, 153 Woodfin, Mrs, 196 Workwoman’s Guide, The, 37, 40, 41, 42 Wright, Patience, 87, 95, 98, 107

Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830

Memory and Material Culture

Children and Material Culture

Death, Memory and Material Culture (Materializing Culture)

Understanding Material Culture

Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America

Anthropology and the Individual: A Material Culture Perspective (Materializing Culture)

Hollywood Beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture (Materializing Culture)

Women Writing Culture

Material culture in America: understanding everyday life

Women of the Renaissance (Women in Culture and Society Series)

Challenging Women: Gender, Culture and Organization

Faulkner and Material Culture (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)

Dinner roles: American women and culinary culture

Material Culture in America; Understanding Everyday Life

Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life

Asian Material Culture (AUP - ICAS Publications)

Material matters: architecture and material practice

Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Materializing Culture)

Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice

Hollywood Beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture

The empire of things: regimes of value and material culture

Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission

Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760

Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination

Defect and Material Mechanics

Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism

Girlfriend Material

Material Witness

Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830

Memory and Material Culture

Children and Material Culture

Death, Memory and Material Culture (Materializing Culture)

Understanding Material Culture

Material Culture and Jewish Thought in America

Anthropology and the Individual: A Material Culture Perspective (Materializing Culture)

Hollywood Beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture (Materializing Culture)

Women Writing Culture

Material culture in America: understanding everyday life

Women of the Renaissance (Women in Culture and Society Series)

Challenging Women: Gender, Culture and Organization

Faulkner and Material Culture (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)

Dinner roles: American women and culinary culture

Material Culture in America; Understanding Everyday Life

Material Culture in America: Understanding Everyday Life

Asian Material Culture (AUP - ICAS Publications)

Material matters: architecture and material practice

Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Materializing Culture)

Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice

Hollywood Beyond the Screen: Design and Material Culture

The empire of things: regimes of value and material culture

Investigating Archaeological Cultures: Material Culture, Variability, and Transmission

Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760

Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination

Defect and Material Mechanics

Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism

Girlfriend Material

Material Witness

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