Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Culture, 1660–1830
Edited by
Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
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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10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
Women and Material
Culture, 1660–1830
10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
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.
Individual chapters © contributors 2007
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted
10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
Contents
Introduction 1
Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
vi Contents
10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
List of Figures
vii
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viii List of Figures
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Notes on the Contributors
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).
ix
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x Notes on the Contributors
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Notes on the Contributors 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
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Acknowledgements
xii
10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
Introduction
Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
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2 Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
and objects and the meanings these interactions generate. Drawing on recent
work in the fields of material culture and eighteenth-century studies,5 it exam-
ines the myriad ways in which objects constituted identity and mediated social,
economic and political relationships in Europe between the late seventeenth
and early nineteenth centuries. In so doing, it builds on and seeks to compli-
cate recent work on women’s role as agents of cultural production in the period.
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Introduction 3
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4 Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
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 eighteenth-
century 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
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Introduction 5
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6 Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
‘surprise’, ‘curiosity’ and fantasy itself. Porter’s speculative exercise – his develop-
ment 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.
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Introduction 7
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,
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8 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).
10 Kowaleski Wallace, p. 5.
11 Kowaleski Wallace, p. 5.
12 Mackie, p. 47.
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Part I
Dress and Adornment
10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
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10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
1
Women and their Jewels
Marcia Pointon
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 vari-
ous 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 import-
ant 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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12 Marcia Pointon
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 dia-
mond faceting upon which the sparkle associated with this stone depends,
diamonds surpass in popularity the dominant pearl of the seventeenth cen-
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Women and their Jewels 13
Figure 1 Joseph Highmore (1692–1780), Mrs. Sharpe and her Child, oil on canvas. Yale Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-11
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 pre-
sented 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
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14 Marcia Pointon
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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Women and their Jewels 15
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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16 Marcia Pointon
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
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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Women and their Jewels 17
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 inappro-
priately signalled moral danger.19
Once they had acquired them, women might sell or otherwise dispose of jew-
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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18 Marcia Pointon
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
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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Women and their Jewels 19
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 under-
stood as a gift of them in deed or law. However, under the term ‘parapher-
nalia’ 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 mak-
ing a written statement; the first Lady Delaval’s first husband left a declar-
ation 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 own-
ership 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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20 Marcia Pointon
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
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:
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Women and their Jewels 21
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
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22 Marcia Pointon
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Women and their Jewels 23
‘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 involv-
ing 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 appear-
ance 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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24 Marcia Pointon
mine.51 Dr John Fothergill, the Quaker physician, around the same time
lamented that a Friend (i.e. a Quaker) named Nanny Greene
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
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 imme-
diately, 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 pos-
sible, appear of use, but this from reasons the Beholder seldom traces to their
source. Too curious adorning of the Person makes a Man appear effem-
inate, 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
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Women and their Jewels 25
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 portrait-
ure, suggesting allegiance to both fashion and a spouse who had almost total
legal rights over a wife’s person but, equally, considerable financial obliga-
tion 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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26 Marcia Pointon
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
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Women and their Jewels 27
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28 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
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Women and their Jewels 29
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30 Marcia Pointon
Consumption’, Textual Practice, 11: 3 (1997): 494–516. For a more detailed discus-
sion of this type of jewellery, see Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”’.
58 [William Combe], A Poetical Epistle to Sir Joshua Reynolds (London: Fielding and
Walker, 1777), Introduction.
59 The Centenary of N. C. Reading & Co. Ltd 1847–1947, Birmingham Public Library,
P.67.13 589877.
60 See Marcia Pointon, ‘Wearing Memory: Mourning, Jewellery and the Body’, in
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2
Fanny’s Pockets: Cotton,
Consumption and Domestic
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 prac-
tice 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 commu-
nities, 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
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32 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White
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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 33
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34 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White
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.
***
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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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 35
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36 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White
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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 37
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
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38 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White
The dresses in the Snowshill collection suggest that it was possible to combine
attention to neoclassical fashionable design, with its emphasis on high waist-
lines 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
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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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 39
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40 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White
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 pop-
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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 41
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 rec-
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42 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White
saw the flowering of what might be called the ‘literature of domestic economy’.
This genre emerged during the eighteenth century as guidebooks to the develop-
ing 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
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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 43
stains out of different fabrics.36 It is in the context of the flowering of this lit-
erature 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.
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44 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White
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 eight-
eenth century and by 1783 proved popular enough to prompt the Society for
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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 45
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 com-
mon 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.
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46 Barbara Burman and Jonathan White
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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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 47
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.
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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 49
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
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Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy 51
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3
‘Changing her gown and setting her
head to rights’: New Shops, New Hats
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)
52
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New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 53
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
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54 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson
A hat offers protection from the elements; but through a ‘fetishistic overvalu-
ation 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 licen-
tious 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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New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 55
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 connec-
tion. 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
Although I would agree that hats as things retain an emotive force, they also
allow women to wield what would conventionally be called masculine polit-
ical 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 espe-
cially 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 bru-
tality. Likewise, the hats they wear function less as a mode to avoid ‘dishon-
our’ 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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56 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson
novels dramatise the misogynistic backlash that occurs, as this example from
Evelina reveals:
The first speech was made by Madame Duval, who said, ‘It’s quite a shock-
ing 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.
‘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 wrin-
kled 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 orna-
mental 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 pur-
pose 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 spinster-
hood, 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.
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New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 57
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 situ-
ation in The Wanderer occurs when the ageing beauty Miss Brinville, ‘adroitly
Articles and prints in The Oxford Magazine satirised the fashion for tower-
ing 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
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58 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson
***
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New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 59
‘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 seduc-
ers, 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,
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60 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson
Figure 14 ‘Morning Dresses’ featuring (far left) a plain white chip hat with a lilac rib-
bon, 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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New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 61
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
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
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62 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson
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
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 fea-
tures of the green nest in green leaves. We definitely saw it, but we say that
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New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 63
Figure 15 ‘Morning Dresses’ The Gallery of Fashion (November 1796). V&A Images/
Victoria and Albert Museum.
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
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New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 65
to charges of sexual availability and even promiscuity. Riley, one of her pur-
suers attributes to her sorceress-like powers:
‘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
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 sin-
gle, 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 meta-
morphose 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 asso-
ciated 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)
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66 Jillian Heydt-Stevenson
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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New Shops, New Hats and New Identities 67
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
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68 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 com-
bined’ while travelling in inclement weather (p. 16).
17 Quoted in Pam Perkins, ‘Social Criticism in The Wanderer’, Essays in Literature, 23.1
(1996): 70.
18 Susan Pearce, Museums, Objects, Collections: A Cultural Study (Washington, DC:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 21.
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Part II
Women and Sculpture
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4
Sculpting in Tiaras: Grand Duchess
Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and
71
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72 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.
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Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts 73
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74 Rosalind P. Blakesley
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 twenty-
eight niches holding vases, statues, busts and other antique objects. . . . Her
Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess should not miss this opportunity
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Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts 75
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76 Rosalind P. Blakesley
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
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Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts 77
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
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78 Rosalind P. Blakesley
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 fur-
niture 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 sig-
nifiers 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 watch-
ful 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
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80 Rosalind P. Blakesley
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Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts 81
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,
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82 Rosalind P. Blakesley
Notes
1 Gen Doy, ‘Hidden from Histories: Women History Painters in Early Nineteenth-
Century 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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Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts 83
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,
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84 Rosalind P. Blakesley
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Grand Duchess Maria Fedorovna as a Producer and Consumer of the Arts 85
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5
Pride and Prejudice: Eighteenth-
century Women Sculptors and their
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 sculp-
tor 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 inclu-
sion 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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Eighteenth-Century Women Sculptors 87
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 ambi-
tious women who devoted themselves to sculpture and the pursuit of public
visibility in the art capitals of Europe. Several of these women won presti-
gious commissions and medals. Elizabeth Berkeley (1750–1828), margravine
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88 Marjan Sterckx
of Anspach, Maria Denman (1776–1861) and Sybella Bullock (n.d.), for exam-
ple, 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
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
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Eighteenth-Century Women Sculptors 89
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90 Marjan Sterckx
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Eighteenth-Century Women Sculptors 91
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92 Marjan Sterckx
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.
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Eighteenth-Century Women Sculptors 93
with the female sex. According to Scheffler, sculpture had been devalued as
an art-form precisely because male sculptors were content to restrict them-
selves to what he called the ‘feminine’ practice of modelling rather than cut-
ting stone.17
Women’s close association with modelling, especially wax modelling,
dates back at least to the Middle Ages, when nuns made candles, wax flow-
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94 Marjan Sterckx
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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Eighteenth-Century Women Sculptors 95
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 gen-
eration 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
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 col-
lection 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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96 Marjan Sterckx
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
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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Eighteenth-Century Women Sculptors 97
Figure 22 Mrs Goldsmith, Frances Stuart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, 1703.
Westminster Abbey, The Undercroft Museum.
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98 Marjan Sterckx
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 profes-
sion, the instrumental role these women played in expanding and popular-
ising the art-form would marginalise them and prevent them from achieving
the success and acclaim they deserved.
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 pres-
ent 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 valu-
able 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 inti-
mate, 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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Eighteenth-Century Women Sculptors 99
3 Between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, sculptresses were mostly con-
centrated 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.
4 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
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100 Marjan Sterckx
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Eighteenth-Century Women Sculptors 101
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.
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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.
37 Quoted in Pyke, p. 55.
38 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
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6
A Female Sculptor and Connoisseur:
Artistic Self-fashioning and the
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 sug-
gests 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 con-
flict between her professional role as a dramatist and the requirement to fulfil
103
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104 Angela Escott
her domestic responsibilities, however, can be seen more clearly in her represen-
tation 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
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106 Angela Escott
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 mys-
tified 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
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 com-
paring 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 attrib-
uted 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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Artistic Self-Fashioning 107
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
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virtuoso, the connoisseur became the target of satire in poems, prints, pam-
phlets, 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 thor-
oughly 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
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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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, prac-
tising 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 appear-
ance. The first description of Lady Horatia, whose name is introduced in a con-
versation 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.
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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Artistic Self-Fashioning 111
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.’
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)
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 farci-
cal language, calculated more, to excite disgust than entertainment’.42 The pas-
sage 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)
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112 Angela Escott
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
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 dis-
solute 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 con-
noisseur 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 pro-
portioned’, ‘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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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
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114 Angela Escott
objectification by returning the viewer’s gaze and adopting masculine facial expres-
sions 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
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Artistic Self-Fashioning 115
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, Neo-
Classicism (London: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 118.
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10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
Part III
The Material Culture of Empire
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10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
7
‘The Taste for Bringing the Outside
in’: Nationalism, Gender and
***
119
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120 Ellen Kennedy Johnson
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:
[Chintz] crept into our houses, our closets, our bedchambers, curtains,
Throughout the eighteenth century, the British East India Company main-
tained 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 eighteenth-
century 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.
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Nationalism, Gender and Landscape Wallpaper 121
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
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122 Ellen Kennedy Johnson
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 grow-
ing 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
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Nationalism, Gender and Landscape Wallpaper 123
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
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124 Ellen Kennedy Johnson
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 wall-
paper genre.
Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the English wallpaper indus-
try, already producing superior quality flock, chintz and floral papers for over
a century, suffered a setback after the introduction of the imported land-
scape papers from Asia. English wallpaper manufacturers rose to the occa-
sion by creating their own versions of Oriental landscapes, but the brilliant
colours and the realistic representations of nature in the authentic hand-
painted copies could not be reproduced at a marketable cost. Therefore, wall-
paper 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 hun-
dreds 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 tech-
nique, then, bridged the gap between the artistry of the hand-painted papers
and the inexpensive, low-quality, machine-printed striped and floral wall-
papers. 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 pro-
moted 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
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Nationalism, Gender and Landscape Wallpaper 125
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
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 con-
duct a battle, presents a light-hearted, mischievous and playful illustration of
Asian culture typical of the images fashioned on numerous chinoiserie dec-
orative 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 explan-
ation 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 scien-
tists 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
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126 Ellen Kennedy Johnson
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Nationalism, Gender and Landscape Wallpaper 127
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128 Ellen Kennedy Johnson
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
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Nationalism, Gender and Landscape Wallpaper 129
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 propon-
ent, 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
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130 Ellen Kennedy Johnson
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132 Ellen Kennedy Johnson
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.
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Nationalism, Gender and Landscape Wallpaper 133
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8
Taihu Tatlers: Aesthetic Translation in
the China Trade
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 cham-
pions, 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 ide-
ological 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 lan-
guage 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 every-
day 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
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Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade 135
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136 David Porter
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
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Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade 137
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 pock-
marked rocks appear as central features in all manner of visual compositions,
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138 David Porter
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 inconceiv-
able 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
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Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade 139
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140 David Porter
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 cat-
egory of the aesthetic, being the product of a distinctly European cultural
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Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade 141
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
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142 David Porter
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Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade 143
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144 David Porter
endless crevices and cavities, never permitted to settle or to proclaim its appre-
hension 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,
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Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade 145
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
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),
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146 David Porter
pp. 110–38; and Eric Arnould and Richard Wilk, ‘Why do the Natives Wear
Adidas?’, Advances in Consumer Research 11 (1984): 748–52.
3 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters, ed. Isobel Grundy (New York:
Penguin, 1997), pp. 148–9.
4 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
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Aesthetic Translation in the China Trade 147
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:
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9
White Slavery: Hannah More,
Women and Fashion
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 concern-
ing the polemical appropriation of images of enslaved Africans.2 If Hannah
More participates in a significant late eighteenth-century backlash against con-
sumption, 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 spiritual-
ity 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 find-
ing 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
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Hannah More, Women and Fashion 149
on education for the lower orders as sensible ideas for an otherwise inflamma-
tory 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
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150 Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace
are ‘forced away . . . from all the endearing connections of domestic life, sep-
arated 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).
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 propor-
tion 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 ‘pub-
lic 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
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her readers take very seriously the idea that women’s true mission is more pri-
vate, 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 oppres-
sive state? To answer these questions, it is helpful to review More’s association
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152 Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace
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 self-
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154 Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace
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156 Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace
(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 cul-
ture’, 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
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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 spir-
itually 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 rhet-
orical 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
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158 Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace
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
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 Nineteenth-
Century 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 gain-
ing 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 voca-
tions 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 dif-
ferent 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’, some-
one ‘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 tra-
dition 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).
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Part IV
Women and Books
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10
Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’
Jennie Batchelor
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 estab-
lished 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 under-
standing of Richardson’s heroine and the material evidence she offered in
163
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164 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 every-
where 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)
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Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’ 165
the fashionable crowd at Ranelagh – who carried copies of the novel while
strolling around the Gardens7 – became a phenomenon in rural communi-
ties 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
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strategically displays her awareness of ‘the critical materials and signs of cos-
tume’ 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
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 read-
ing 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 func-
tioned as ‘a sign of the virtue of the fan’s holder’, who was ‘herself asked by
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Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’ 167
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
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 home-
spun 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
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Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’ 169
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 neighbour-
ing 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)
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Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’ 173
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
Acknowledgement
I am very grateful to Kate Williams for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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Notes
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.
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Reinstating the ‘Pamela Vogue’ 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).
24 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.
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11
The Book as Cosmopolitan Object:
Women’s Publishing, Collecting
176
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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 uni-
versity 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
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178 Alessa Johns
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, com-
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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
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180
Ernst August Sophie von Hannover
Augusta of Saxe-Gotha Frederick 7 others 6 others Wilhelmine Friedrich der Große Anna Amalia Philippine Charlotte Karl I
von Bayreuth Äbtissin von von Braunschweig
Quedlinburg
Charlotte of George III 7 others Augusta Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Anna Amalia Wilhelm Adolf 10 others
Mecklenburg- von Sachsen
Strelitz -Weimar
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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
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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 –
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
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Philippine Charlotte’s library, nearly twice the size of Amalia’s, reveals the
same differences from Frederick’s and the same preoccupations. If Frederick
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186 Alessa Johns
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
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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
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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.
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Women’s Publishing, Collecting and Anglo-German Exchange 191
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
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12
‘Books without which I cannot write’:
How Did Eighteenth-century Women
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 intel-
lectually and spiritually and to add to humanity’s stores of knowledge and cul-
ture. 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 establish-
ment 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 per-
mission 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
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 193
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
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
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194 Susan Staves
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 195
‘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 con-
tinued to be a crucial way of getting goods throughout the eighteenth and
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 inde-
pendently as a writer and described herself, living with the Kingsboroughs,
as ‘almost as deeply in immersed in study as the Baron himself’.14 School-
teachers 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 pro-
duce 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 spe-
cial 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 publish-
ers. 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,
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196 Susan Staves
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.
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 197
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,
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198 Susan Staves
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:
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
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 sug-
gests that a right-thinking publisher in a relationship with her will under-
stand 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 temporar-
ily 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 pub-
lishers, and so be able to reciprocate with gifts that are still more valuable.
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 199
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
Raven makes the important point that there was no bright line between pub-
lic 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 sup-
ports his claim that ‘many apparently private libraries were designed for dis-
play 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
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200 Susan Staves
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 col-
lection 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
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 201
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
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202 Susan Staves
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 203
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 mem-
bers from Spenser’s Fairie Queene, he omitted the indecent parts: ‘he is
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 nat-
urally 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 dis-
cover the kinds of complex systems of reciprocal relationships that fasci-
nated 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 tradi-
tional 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
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204 Susan Staves
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
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 205
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206 Susan Staves
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 flum-
moxed 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.
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 207
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
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208 Susan Staves
Conclusion
The subject of how women writers got the books they read has yet to be thor-
oughly 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
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 209
Notes
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.
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210 Susan Staves
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How Did Women Writers Get the Books They Read? 211
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
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Select Bibliography
Ackerman, Phyllis. Wallpaper: Its History, Design, and Use. New York: Tudor Publishing
Company, 1938.
213
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214 Select Bibliography
Chadwick, Whitney, Women, Art, and Society. London: Thames & Hudson, 1990.
Chapman, Pauline. Madame Tussaud in England. Career Woman Extraordinary. London:
Quiller Press, 1992.
Cherry, Deborah. Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850–1900.
London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Clunas, Craig. Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1996.
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Select Bibliography 215
10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
216 Select Bibliography
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.
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Index
217
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218 Index
10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
Index 219
as form of slavery, 5, 147, 148–51, Grand Tour, The, 105, 107, 109, 128,
154–5 130
Fedorovna, Maria (Empress of Russia), 4, Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 75
71–82, 72, 79, 80 Griffith, Elizabeth, 195
as artist, 72–3, 77–8, 81, 82 Grimm, Baron von, 78
and charities, 81–2 Grosholtz, Marie (see Tussaud, Madame)
as patron, 72, 74–6, 82, 83n15 Gwilliam, Tassie, 165
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220 Index
10.1057/9780230223097 - Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830, Edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan
Index 221
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222 Index
Salmon, Mrs, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100n21, Talbot, Catherine, 203
102n38 taste, 24, 104, 109, 113, 119, 122,
Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique, 130, 131 124–5, 132, 136, 138, 139
Scarry, Elaine, 61–2 tea, 136, 142
Scheffler, Karl, 92 textile market, 36, 37
Schurman, Anna Maria van, 94 Thomas, Elizabeth, 205, 208
sculptor (female), 4, 80–1, 86–98, Thrale, Hester (see also Piozzi), 199, 205
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Index 223
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