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33 results

Page 1 of 2

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Chloe Wigston Smith, University of York, Beth Fowkes Tobin, Arizona State University
  • Book:
    Small Things in the Eighteenth Century
    Published online:
    29 September 2022
    Print publication:
    29 September 2022, pp 1-12

  • Summary

    This collection brings together an international group of scholars to address an expansive range of small things, paying close attention, for the first time, to the rich interaction between scale and the body. Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how entangled small things, such as mugs, buttons, and buckles, were with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small objects, such as tiny books, ceramic trinkets, toothpick cases, and patch boxes, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users, and also at the same time signaling the limits of the body’s adeptness or the hand’s dexterity. The volume also explores the mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry into circumscribed spaces political, philosophical, and cultural concepts; and how small items, tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants for example, were shaped by empire and contributed to Enlightenment systems of knowledge production. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, small things negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global colonial goods.

Small Things in the Eighteenth Century
  • The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature
  • Edited by Chloe Wigston Smith, Beth Fowkes Tobin
  • Published online:
    29 September 2022
    Print publication:
    29 September 2022
  • Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how objects such as mugs and handkerchiefs were entangled with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small things, from tiny books to ceramic trinkets and toothpick cases, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users while at the same time signalling the limits of the body's adeptness or the hand's dexterity. Simultaneously, the volume explores the striking mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry political, philosophical, and cultural concepts into circumscribed spaces. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, such small things as tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global goods.

  • 4 - Small, Familiar Things on Trial and on Stage

  • from Part I - Reading Small Things
  • Edited by Chloe Wigston Smith, University of York, Beth Fowkes Tobin, Arizona State University
  • Book:
    Small Things in the Eighteenth Century
    Published online:
    29 September 2022
    Print publication:
    29 September 2022, pp 64-76

  • Summary

    This chapter studies small things that were neither expensive nor finely crafted, but were cherished by their owners, drawing on trials for theft at the Old Bailey and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Small items such as buttons, thimbles, needles, and handkerchiefs were easily pilfered by thieves, and appear frequently as stolen goods that women and men sought to recover through the courts. In both the courthouse and the playhouse, thieves and victims agreed that small things could be recognized by their original owners. Trial testimony shows how owners recalled “remarkable” details about their possessions, describing tiny marks known only to them and discerned via repeated handling and viewing over time. In this way, these remarkable details, through their emphasis on sight, offer alternative ways to comprehend the affordance of things in the eighteenth century. Such personal marks prove troublesome to the thieves of Gay’s ballad opera, whose operations depend on small things being made unfamiliar in order to circulate in the secondhand marketplace. Nothing was too small or too commonplace to be reclaimed by someone. Remarkable details held out the promise that small things could be returned and that no thing was too commonplace to be missed by someone.

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