Descriptions of clothing and textiles increasingly circulated across textual genres and beyond in eighteenth-century England, entangled with an expanding world of consumer goods that has already been well traced by historians. It has also been argued that, though eighteenth-century men were avid consumers, clothing and textiles held particular significance for women as a potent tool with which to construct and communicate identity. This book therefore explores the meaning, use, and significance of textual descriptions of women’s clothing across a range of sources, asking three key questions: where was women’s clothing described, and by whom? How was it described? And why? While these are not entirely new questions, attempts to answer them have been piecemeal and scattered across scholarship on consumption in the long eighteenth century. While Joan Thirsk first spoke of an early modern ‘consumer society’ in 1978, it is perhaps Neil McKendrick’s 1982 claim for ‘a consumer revolution’ fuelled by ‘class competition and emulative spending’ which has been most influential in shaping this literature. In responding to McKendrick, scholars set the questions which have dominated ever since: was there a ‘consumer revolution’ in the eighteenth century? Was it unique to the period? How wide was its reach? Who took part, how, and why? While the ‘consumer revolution’ thesis has been challenged and nuanced over the years, there remains widespread consensus that there was, if not a ‘revolution’, then a growing world of goods to which more and more people had access across the period, be it through first or second-hand purchase, theft, inheritance, gifting, or charity.

The limitations to McKendrick’s claim that changing consumer behaviour could be explained primarily by emulation and competitive spending have been more roundly demonstrated. A number of studies have shown that the consumption of material goods by the middling, gentry, and elite was just not about the novel, and did not simply reflect a desire to clamber up the social ladder, though it could still act as an indication of status. The labouring classes, so often the targets of contemporary critiques around clothing and emulation in the eighteenth century, have also been the subject of a number of studies which demonstrate that emulative spending alone cannot sufficiently account for their consumption. This thorough rejection of emulation as the motivation for increased consumption, however, prompted a new set of questions: if consumption was not driven by social competition, then what was it about?

INTRODUCTION

Linen (or linens) as a category of clothing has appeared across all the previous chapters: women bequeathed linen to family, friends, and servants; it was advertised as lost, stolen, or found; women recorded purchases of linen for themselves, the household, and the family; and paupers in need were provided with linen by the parish. Finally, in the next chapter we will hear from the gentlewoman Catherine Ettrick who alleged that, although she had brought a ‘great quantity of linen’ to her marriage, she was forced to sleep in damp and cold sheets as a result of her husband’s cruelty. Linen is therefore ubiquitous across the sources and social hierarchy, and this chapter explores it as a popularly understood category of clothing. Though a seemingly sparse descriptive term, ‘linen’ encompassed a range of meanings and uses and, as Alice Dolan has highlighted, forms a useful case study precisely because it was ‘part of the social fabric of daily life’. While the period saw great changes in women’s clothing such as the decline of woollen outerwear as well as the expanding descriptive languages traced across previous chapters, linen remained steadily in use and significant across it. Material literacy surrounding linen was not focused solely on price and textile type, but also revolved around understandings of cleanliness, health, decency, and the rhythms of everyday life. Linen was closely linked to the body and bodily integrity as well as to the female life cycle, while care of people and care of their linen were tied together in the contemporary imagination.

In order to untangle some of the meanings and uses attached to linen, this chapter explores it as a descriptive category from three angles. First, by looking at the purchase and provision of linen, it reveals a network of relationships, responsibilities, and material obligations involved in its supply and maintenance, which could prove a significant undertaking as linens were made, washed, worn out, and replaced. This provision might become burdensome for women at certain points in the life cycle, and the chapter secondly explores the fates of several women who became materially dependent on others to provide them with clean and sufficient linen. However, it also shows how their linen might be put to use as a rhetorical tool in different contexts, with descriptions demonstrating their need as well as speaking to material obligations and relationships of dependence.

INTRODUCTION

In July 1782, the widow Mary Flint of York died, leaving behind a last will and testament signed in December 1781. In this document, Flint bequeathed several items of clothing including a ‘striped Linen Gown of my own Spinning’ to Mary Nixon, a ‘red and white flowered Gown’ to Ann Nixon, and a ‘brown Poplin Gown’ to Alice German, leaving ‘All the rest of my Wearing Apparel’ to be passed on to her servant Hannah Smith. The hand the will is written in is not Flint’s own but rather that of the paid scribe, public notary, or local clergyman who drew up the document on her behalf. As with other wills from the period, the document which survives today is the result of a process shaped by a range of factors including the needs and wants of Flint as an individual, her familial and social networks, religious considerations, and the expectations and constraints of the genre as a legal document, as well as ‘practices of textual production, dissemination, and reception’ with which a number of people and institutions were involved. While, as Lloyd Davis has argued, we cannot disentangle Flint’s own voice entirely from this complex network of practices, the descriptions of clothing contained in her will were likely her own. We will never know if they came from memory or if she had these items to hand as she drew up the document. Perhaps she was even wearing one of the gowns. Her will sheds light on the words available to her with which to describe her own wardrobe, something of importance to her as she planned its dispersal after her death. However, as this chapter argues, these descriptions alone do not grant easy insight into her thoughts or feelings.

In the same year that Mary Flint died, an anonymous individual placed an advertisement in the London newspaper The Daily Advertiser. The advertisement stated that a ‘Caravan-Box’ containing, amongst other things, ‘one green Tabby Gown, lined with a light-grey Persian, topt with Yellow’, ‘one Laylock flowered Cotton Gown’, and ‘one purple and white Cotton Bed-Gown, lined with Callico’ had been dropped from a Hackney Coach the previous evening. The advertiser offered a reward of two guineas to anyone who would return the box.

INTRODUCTION

In March 1765, Catherine Ettrick began proceedings in the Durham Consistory Court to obtain a separation from her husband William Ettrick. As we shall see, the Ettrick case is characterised by many similar themes to those found in other suits for separation in this period in terms of how both parties attempted to represent the behaviour of the other. However, in this chapter I shift the focus onto what it might be able to tell us about the role of women’s clothing in the context of marital breakdown, as Catherine Ettrick’s clothing appears again and again in her own allegations, in her husband’s response to them, and in the depositions of a number of witnesses. This analysis is exploratory as I look across the different ways in which the clothing of one woman was described, and demonstrate what might be gained from using a source perhaps less familiar to scholars of consumption than those explored in previous chapters. As we have seen, the use of court records as a source is nothing new as trials for theft have been effectively mined for details about stolen clothing. Indeed, trial records have been hailed as an essential corrective to ‘static’ lists of clothing found in sources like probate records and account books, as they can reveal things in movement and use.

Attention has already turned to the role of clothing and other objects in suits for breach of promise, and scholars have demonstrated that torn and disordered clothing could provide powerful evidence in rape trials. Nevertheless, the role of clothing and textiles in other types of litigation beyond theft remains underexplored. This is perhaps because trials for theft seem to be straightforwardly concerned with consumer goods in a way that other records are not, and appear to confirm the existence of the things described. In contrast, the clothing described in other types of litigation is often a more ambiguous blend of the real, the imagined, and the rhetorical; in the previous chapter, for instance, we found linen belonging to Mary Vezey described in different ways during her husband’s trial. It has therefore been studies of marital breakdown and violence which have noted the role that clothing could play, rather than scholarship on clothing and consumption. Indeed, if we look to records of suits for separation only for confirmation of what women owned, we must find ourselves disappointed.

It is fitting to conclude by revisiting Mary Braithwait, who we first encountered in Chapter 1. She is one of the women at the heart of this book: ordinary, not especially wealthy, and only indirectly known to us through glimpses in the records. Nearing the end of her life in 1779, Braithwait channelled considerable energies into a series of additional notes attached to her formal will. In doing so, she drew on practices and languages of description accumulated across her lifetime. By bequeathing items such as ‘2 flanel peticoats’ and ‘2 flanel aprons’ to her ‘helpless’ sister Grace, she put intimate knowledge of her wardrobe to use alongside a broader material literacy which deployed a widely recognisable descriptive language for clothing and textiles. By signalling what was ‘best’ or ‘new’, she also took part in similar processes of ordering to those used by other women across the social hierarchy. Braithwait’s probate records are a rare instance of instructions spilling out beyond the contained legal strictures of a will, but act as a broader example of how women in eighteenth-century England were able to put these skills and knowledge to use when describing their clothing.

It is practices of description like this that the previous chapters have been concerned with, though they have by no means covered all the descriptive patterns, terms, or meanings surrounding women’s clothing and textiles in the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century saw a transformation in practices of description, aided not only by an expanding world of goods which necessitated new descriptive languages but also by wider changes such as an ever-growing print culture. Acts of description increased and were accumulated across a broad range of textual genres, as shown in Chapters 1, 2, and 3. As Chapter 3 also demonstrates, this impacted across the social hierarchy, albeit in different ways. There is therefore still much to be done to investigate the impact of these flourishing languages of description; both Chloe Wigston Smith and Jennie Batchelor have demonstrated the gains to be made by examining literary depictions of clothing alongside a wider range of printed materials, for instance. The circulation of knowledge about fashionable trends via manuscript, print, and beyond has also been largely bypassed in my discussion, but formed an important descriptive practice in its own right.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter continues to focus on detailed description by exploring the act of accounting, looking at individual, family, and household expenditure. Chapter 3 considers accounting in an institutional context. Looking across the accounts kept by seven women spanning 1705 to 1803, this chapter first considers how women’s clothing appears in and across their account books as well as those belonging to family members, and then offers an in-depth exploration of how women’s clothing was described in these sources. These books, like many surviving account books, can be found in collections of family papers belonging overwhelmingly to men and women of the middling and gentry classes, and so speak principally to their experiences. While detailed description in accounts has sometimes been interpreted as unnecessary for the accurate keeping of accounts, largely as a result of an emphasis on rationality in histories of accounting, this chapter demonstrates that the very frequency with which it was used demands reconsideration of this. By drawing on a comparison with the language used to describe clothing and textiles in bills issued by retailers, it also demonstrates how descriptions might be moved across and between texts during the accounting process, which has important implications for our understanding of description, authorship, and meaning. Indeed, it shows how the issue, payment, and recording of bills contributed significantly to the broader circulation of descriptive terms and material literacy surrounding clothing and textiles.

Accounting became increasingly widespread after 1650, and there is ample evidence to suggest that many eighteenth-century women were competent accountants. Indeed, Kenneth Charlton and Margaret Spufford have suggested that early modern women’s training in ‘ciphering’ may have been given little space in sources like journals precisely because ‘it was so necessary and obvious that it was assumed’. Amy Froide has conducted a more thorough investigation into levels of female numeracy, showing that it was a discipline cultivated across the social hierarchy. How and when women acquired these skills, however, is more difficult to determine, though it has been suggested that it was a skill acquired primarily in the home. As Beverly Lemire has suggested, surviving accounts show that women’s shift to ‘numeric record-keeping’ was a gradual process which took place at a slower pace than men’s, but the very fact that eighteenth-century women’s manuscript accounts exist in as-yet uncounted numbers in archives across England demonstrates that many were able to acquire competency in accounting from somewhere.

INTRODUCTION

Discussion has thus far focused primarily on descriptions by the owner of an item or items of clothing, though the previous chapters have demonstrated that authorship was not always straightforward. However, throughout we have also encountered women whose clothing was described by someone else, whether by mistresses, mothers, family members, employees, or even strangers. To further explore this, this chapter moves beyond descriptions authored by owners to trace material literacies across the records of the old poor law. These records have been successfully mined for details about the quantity and cost of clothing issued by parishes, but there has been far less exploration of the textual and descriptive practices evident across the sources themselves. However, this chapter argues that these practices are in themselves significant. Drawing together accounts and other records across a range of parishes, it therefore looks at the description of poor women’s clothing from three perspectives: that of suppliers; that of overseers of the poor; and that of the poor themselves. This demonstrates differences across texts and in descriptive practices which highlight ambiguities surrounding the description of an individual’s clothing by someone else, shaped by the relationships involved in the provision of poor relief. As outlined in the previous chapter, records such as accounts could be both reflective and constitutive of relationships of power and authority, and this was certainly the case for those generated by the day-to-day administration of the old poor law. Description played a key role in this context, with descriptions of the clothing issued to paupers functioning as a record of their dependence on the parish. Drawing on a comparison with the descriptive languages for women’s clothing traced across Chapters 1 and 2, this chapter also demonstrates that there may have been social or financial barriers to certain forms of material literacy, even in the context of an ever-expanding descriptive landscape for clothing and textiles across the eighteenth century. This was of course intimately linked to the material reality of everyday life for those living at the margins of society, as the records of the old poor law suggest a very different world of goods to that traced in previous chapters.