Material Lives

Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century

Serena Dyer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350127005
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Eighteenth-century women told their life stories through making. With its compelling stories of women's material experiences and practices, Material Lives offers a new perspective on eighteenth-century production and consumption. Genteel women's making has traditionally been seen as decorative, trivial and superficial. Yet their material archives, forged through fabric samples, watercolours, dressed prints and dolls' garments, reveal how women used the material culture of making to record and navigate their lives. Material Lives positions women as 'makers' in a consumer society. Through fragments of fabric and paper, Dyer explores an innovative way of accessing the lives of otherwise obscured women. For researchers and students of material culture, dress history, consumption, gender and women's history, it offers a rich resource to illuminate the power of needles, paintbrushes and scissors.

1

Introduction:
Making material lives

The lives of eighteenth-century women endure through a patchwork of archival remains. Some women’s lives have been determined through pounds, shillings and pence, scratched out in homemade ink across the sprawling pages of account books.¹ Others have been reconstructed through women’s social engagements, everyday practices and emotional lives in diaries and letters, detailing the minutiae of scandalous and quotidian lives alike.² A few select, celebrated women authored autobiographies and memoirs, retelling and crafting their exceptional tales for a clamorous readership.³ Whether self-consciously constructed as memorializing ego-documents, or the incidental recording of daily life, women throughout history have left their mark. Yet, for all the information contained in the sheets and pages of missives, receipts, journals and periodicals, words and numbers have never been the only vocabularies used to express personal experiences, practices and narratives. The pen was only one tool amongst a diverse apparatus, which included the needle, the paint brush, scissors and pins. It is the lives of women as detailed through the products of this miscellany of creative material methods which form the focus for this book.

Eighteenth-century women constructed their material lives both deliberately, through concerted and continuous practices of self-reflection and structured documentation, and coincidentally, through spontaneous, procedural and incidental records of their interactions with the material world. The eighteenth century has been characterized as a period of material eruption, in which consumers were faced with an increasingly sophisticated and rich material world. In response to this abundance of goods, fresh behaviours for mediating individual relationships with the material world were fostered, diversifying from the household inventory or account book. These supplementary methods of reporting and recording functioned outside of traditional production and consumption paradigms and acted as forms of material diary. Genteel eighteenth-century women, I argue, fashioned narratives of their lives through series of objects – both purchased and homemade – which sat at the conjunction of the manual labour of making and cultures of consumption. This model of material life writing forces us to reconsider the boundaries often imposed between literary life writing, historical record and artistic endeavour, and offers an opportunity to reflect upon the mutability and multiplicity of roles played by material culture.

This book concentrates on four genteel eighteenth-century women: Barbara Johnson (1738–1825), Ann Frankland Lewis (later Hare, 1757–1842), Sabine Winn (née d’Hervart, 1734–98) and Laetitia Powell (née Clark, 1741–1801).⁴ The women in this group share several key characteristics, which position them as the ideal protagonists in and proponents of the material life writing model. They all belonged to the ‘genteel’ strata of Georgian society and were financially equipped to engage in fashionable consumption and making practices.⁵ They lived contemporaneously to each other, all having been born between 1734 and 1757, and they were all active in undertaking their material activities between the 1750s and 1820s. Finally, they all produced prolific material records of their lives, which were maintained consistently for extended periods. Collectively, they documented over 170 years through a range of material practices. These women have been selected because they represent four categories of material life writing. Johnson kept an album of fabric samples taken from her garments for nearly eighty years, which I position as a material system of accounting (Figure 1.1). Lewis painted annual watercolours of herself in significant garments, and Powell dressed dolls in miniature versions of her own clothes, which I classify as two types of repeated sartorial self-representation (Figures 1.2 and 1.4), and Winn consumed and embellished prints with silks as part of a portfolio practice of collecting, consuming and making (Figure 1.3). These women encapsulate four different approaches, yet all four embody material methods of chronicling a life through making.

Figure 1.1 Barbara Johnson’s Album, 1746–1823, T.219-1973. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Crucially, the material records produced by these women challenge us to re-evaluate and reinterpret scholarship on eighteenth-century production and consumption. The ‘consumer society’ and the ‘industrial revolution’ have been the dominant explanatory frameworks levied by historians to make sense of seismic social and economic change across the eighteenth century.⁶ In their wake, they have given rise to a division between people who made things and people who bought things, which I refer to as the producer/consumer binary. This artificial distinction has shaped scholarship on shopping and consumption and has disguised the nuanced material knowledge and making skills possessed by many consumers. Johnson, Lewis, Winn and Powell are from the ranks of the genteel women consumers often positioned as driving forward the ‘consumer revolution’, and an examination of their bills, receipts and accounts alone would certainly support this established perspective. The conclusions reached through an exclusive focus on words and numbers are, however, fundamentally challenged by the material records kept by all four women. Instead, their material archives reveal an intimate knowledge of materiality, materials and material culture and, critically, an engagement with practices and processes of making. These collections resist straightforward categorization as records of production or consumption. They exist outside of this binary and compel us to question the rigidity of its construction.

The narratives which women stitched and sketched of their lives are as legible as those written in ink. Deciphering the objects at the heart of these stories has become vital to many historical studies, and material culture is no longer dismissed as ephemeral by scholars.⁷ James Deetz argued four decades ago that while ‘the written document has its proper and important place’, it is imperative that sometimes we ‘set aside our perusal of diaries, court records, and inventories, and listen to another voice’.⁸ The object-centred and object-attentive studies which now flourish have cultivated a vibrant and ever-expanding field, which has both opened up lost and marginal areas for study, and allowed us to re-examine traditional historical perspectives. Barbara Burman and Ariane Fennetaux’s The Pocket, for instance, uses ‘accumulated shards of evidence’ to enable the ‘excavations of lost or marginal objects’, while Giorgio Riello’s Cotton mobilizes material culture methodologies in order to challenge conventional economic explanations for global change.⁹ Elsewhere in the field, teapots, tables and tureens have been shown to have acted as agents of empire, while emotional tales of love and loss have been untangled from shoes and gloves.¹⁰ The expansive studies of the ‘material turn’ have firmly revealed the emotional, cultural, political, economic and social agency which can be deciphered through things.

Figure 1.2 Ann Frankland Lewis, The dress of year 1775. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, www.lacma.org.

Figure 1.3 Nicolas Larmessin IV, Le Cuvier, after Nicolas Lancret, dressed by Sabine Winn, 1761–1765, NT 960084.1. Copyright National Trust.

Figure 1.4 The Powell Collection of Dolls, W.183-1919. Copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In spite of the maturation of the field, the inherent challenges of material culture studies still ring true and should not be left unacknowledged, even in work which champions their use. The vagaries of survival have presented a particular obstacle in the assembly of this book. Evidence of women’s lifelong engagement with the practice of material life writing is an archival anomaly which this book readily exploits. Johnson, Lewis, Winn and Powell’s archives are, although not unique survivals, unusual in their relatively comprehensive endurance. Comparable sources by other women survive as scrawls and scraps, fragmentary snippets of a fuller and consistent engagement with analogous material practices. When brought into conversation with their complete kin, it is possible to begin to make sense of these orphaned objects. The material records at the heart of this book are, indeed, joyous accidents of survival, but that does not mean they are any less representative or rich than their written equivalents. Three hundred years of retention, care and curatorial or archival decisions have shaped what is held within museum stores and archives alike; but the perceived ephemerality of dolls, watercolours and fabrics has caused them to suffer more indignities of separation and disposal than their written counterparts.

The legibility of this variety of material and visual sources is also a challenge to the recovery of material lives. The relat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Making material lives
• 2 Material accounting: A sartorial account book
• 3 Dress of the year: Watercolours
• 4 Adorned in silk: Dressed prints
• 5 Fashions in miniature: Dolls
• 6 Conclusion: Material afterlives
• Glossary of sartorial terms
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright