Abstract
This chapter focuses on the home of the leading actress, Anne Oldfield (1683–1730), a figure central to early constructions of celebrity. Focusing on the auction catalogue for Oldfield’s home at 60 Grosvenor Street, London, the chapter explores how this unique document enables us to reconstruct Oldfield’s domestic interiors, opening up new ways of understanding her taste, wealth and professional success. Auctions were not merely a place to buy goods, but also a site of theatrical spectacle and fashionable sociability. Arranged by the leading auctioneer, Christopher Cock, the chapter argues that when read alongside contemporary satires and accounts of auctions, the Oldfield catalogue allows us to glimpse a fascinating means through which Oldfield’s home came to serve as a site for the consumption of her celebrity.
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Notes
- 1.
Colley Cibber, “To the Reader,” The Provok’d Husband (London: J. Watts, 1728), vii–viii.
- 2.
Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2010), 101. Nussbaum articulates similar arguments in a discussion of Oldfield’s memoirs in, “‘More than a Woman’: Early Memoirs of British Actresses,” in New Windows on a Woman’s World: Essays for Jocelyn Harris, ed. Colin Gibson and Lisa Marr (Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago, 2005), 225–42.
- 3.
On the significance of these memoirs, and their relationship to other actress memoirs of the period, see Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 92–121.
- 4.
Pat Rogers and Paul Baines, Edmund Curll: Bookseller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 229.
- 5.
William Egerton [Edmund Curll], Faithful Memoirs of … Mrs. Anne Oldfield (London: 1731), 209.
- 6.
A Catalogue of All the Rich Furniture of Mrs. Oldfield, Deceas’d … Which Will Be Sold By Auction … on Tuesday the 9th of February … Catalogues to Be Had Gratis… at the Place of Sale, and at Mr. Cock’s in Broad-Street, Golden-Square (London, 1731). The English Short-Title Catalogue only identifies one surviving copy of the catalogue under the citation number N27073.
- 7.
The Daily Post, Friday 15 January 1731, issue 3534.
- 8.
Joanne Lafler, The Celebrated Mrs. Oldfield (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 145.
- 9.
Hannah Greig, “Eighteenth-Century English Interiors in Image and Text,” in Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Space since the Renaissance, ed. Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant (London: V&A Publications, 2006), 102–27 (121).
- 10.
For a discussion of domestic interiors and interiority in the early novel, see Charlotte Grant, “‘One’s Self, and One’s House, One’s Furniture’: From Object to Interior in British Fiction, 1720–1900,” in Imagined Interiors, eds. Aynsley and Grant, 134–53; Karen Lipsedge, Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
- 11.
Nussbaum, ‘More than a Woman’: Early Memoirs of British Actresses, 234.
- 12.
See Authentick Memoirs of the Life of that Celebrated Actress Mrs. Ann Oldfield (London: 1730), 29.
- 13.
F. H. W. Sheppard, ed., “Grosvenor Street: South Side,” in Survey of London: Volume 40, the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 (The Buildings) (London: London County Council, 1980), 44–57.
- 14.
Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 17–18.
- 15.
In the majority of cases the catalogue notes the floor of the house on which a given room was located; where this information is not given, I have made a deduction based upon the number of rooms that could be accommodated on each floor, and the likely position of rooms with specific functions in the period.
- 16.
On 17 April 1728, Mrs Pendarves wrote to her friend, Mrs Delany (Ann Granville), that: “Lord Hervey is recovered I guess, for I met him one day last week with Mrs. Oldfield in her coach”. Lady Llanover, ed., The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany: With Interesting Reminiscences of King George III and Queen Charlotte, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1861), vol. I, 170–71.
- 17.
Not all objects in the catalogue are given a price, and where prices are given it is unclear whether these are reserve prices or a designated asking price.
- 18.
This information is taken from Lorna Weatherill’s study of 430 women’s inventories within a whole sample of 2902 English inventories for the period 1675–1725: “A Possession of One’s Own: Women and Consumer Behaviour in England, 1660–1740”, Journal of British Studies 25, no. 2 (1986): 135.
- 19.
Oldfield’s will makes it clear that she already had monies invested in various investment schemes, although the exact sums are not known. Copies of Oldfield’s will and a codicil are included by Curll as Appendices II and III, immediately following the main body of the text of Faithful Memoirs. These appendices have individual pagination. Two surviving manuscripts (held at the Garrick Club, London) show that Oldfield held South Sea stock beyond the company’s crash in 1720, with Oldfield appointing an attorney to handle the stock in 1723. A surviving document with her signature authorising the sale of this stock is undated.
- 20.
For a summary of Oldfield’s known salaries and financial negotiations with Drury Lane and the Haymarket, see Jane Milling, “Oldfield, Anne (1683–1730),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography 41: 677–79.
- 21.
Recent studies have argued that the first actresses to emerge as celebrities were those of the later eighteenth century: see, for example, Robyn Asleson, ed., Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776–1812 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
- 22.
On the increased buying power of British households, see Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1987), 40. The study of material culture in Britain during the eighteenth century has undergone much development in recent decades, especially since the publication of John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993). For a summary of research on the material lives of women in the period, see Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, “Introduction,” in Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830, ed. Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1–8.
- 23.
For more information on British advances in the manufacture of interior decorative materials see Charles Saumarez Smith, The Rise of Design: Design and the Domestic Interior in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Pimlico, 2000), 48–50.
- 24.
Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993), 53. On the luxury debates, see Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
- 25.
James Peck, “Anne Oldfield’s Lady Townly: Consumption, Credit, and the Whig Hegemony of the 1720s,” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 397–416 (402).
- 26.
This is not, of course, clear evidence of the provenance of the art works listed, rather revealing that certain works Oldfield owned could, at the time, be thought to be originals by these masters. These works are distinguished from those copied in the manner of other artists, with the catalogue describing the latter category using the preposition “after”.
- 27.
Marcia Pointon, “Women and their Jewels,” in Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830, ed. Batchelor and Kaplan, 11–30.
- 28.
Authentick Memoirs, 29.
- 29.
Cibber, “To the Reader”, viii.
- 30.
Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), vol. I, Letter XII, 39.
- 31.
Brian Learmount, A History of the Auction (Frome and London: Barnard and Learmount, 1985), 27.
- 32.
See Daily Journal, 20 February 1731, issue 3160.
- 33.
The information presented here is drawn from the database compiled by Richard Stephens: Cock, Christopher (active 1717, died 1748); in “The art world in Britain 1660 to 1735,” at http://artworld.york.ac.uk, accessed 17 December 2016.
- 34.
Learmount, 27.
- 35.
For a transcription of the list of the items sold in the sale, including details of the three Pope portraits, see https://artworld.york.ac.uk/sourceView.do?sourceUrn=5.0155.428&sc=on&tl=on&bl=on&dc=all&br=no, accessed 27 January 2017. For a clear identification of the three Pope portraits on sale see William Kurtz Wimsatt, The Portraits of Alexander Pope (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), xviii.
- 36.
Cited in Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 20. Deutsch’s source is Frederick W. Hilles, ed., Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds (New York: McGraw Hill, 1952), 24–25.
- 37.
Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, 20.
- 38.
James McLaverty, Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
- 39.
Joseph Andrews, vol. II, in The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 240.
- 40.
“Part of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire, Modernized in Burlesque Verse,” in The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding: Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq, vol. I, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 113, l. 376–83. The translation was published in Fielding’s Miscellanies of 1743, yet the preface states the work was first drafted when Fielding was twenty years old, making it possible that this was his earliest satire of Cock, dating to around 1727.
- 41.
Henry Fielding, “The Historical Register, for the Year 1736,” in The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding: The Plays, vol. 3: 1734–1742, ed. Thomas Lockwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), 424, l. 16–24.
- 42.
For an excellent discussion of Charke’s breeches role as Mr Hen, see Jill Campbell, “‘When Men Women Turn’: Gender Reversals in Fielding’s Plays,” in Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross Dressing, ed. Leslie Ferris (London: Routledge, 1993), 58–79, especially 65, 71–75.
- 43.
Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 136.
- 44.
Fielding, “The Historical Register,” 426, l. 7–13.
- 45.
Fielding, “The Historical Register,” 425, l. 14–15.
- 46.
Fielding, “The Historical Register,” 429, l. 8–10.
- 47.
Campbell, 75.
- 48.
Campbell, 71.
- 49.
“Sober Advice from Horace,” The Poems of Alexander Pope. Volume IV. Imitations of Horace, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen & Co., 1953), 75, ll. 1–6.
- 50.
Curll included transcripts of both Maynwaring’s and Oldfield’s wills in his memoir of the actress. See Egerton [Curll], Faithful Memoirs, Appendix II, 5.
- 51.
Curll’s phrasing in Faithful Memoirs suggests that the “Dwelling-House” and “Furniture” (209) were left, in Oldfield’s will, to Churchill, but that the other contents of the house were part of the estate that Oldfield had instructed to liquidate.
- 52.
Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 18.
Works Cited
A Catalogue of All the Rich Furniture of Mrs. Oldfield, Deceas’d… Which Will Be Sold By Auction… on Tuesday the 9th of February… Catalogues to Be Had Gratis… at the Place of Sale, and at Mr. Cock’s in Broad-street, Golden-Square. London, 1731.
Authentick Memoirs of the Life of that Celebrated Actress Mrs. Ann Oldfield. London, 1730.
Burney, Frances. Evelina, edited by Edward A. Bloom. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Cibber, Colley. The Provok’d Husband. London: J. Watts, 1728.
Cowan, Brian. The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.
Deutsch, Helen. Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Egerton, William [Edmund Curll]. Faithful Memoirs of … Mrs. Anne Oldfield. London, 1731.
Fielding, Henry. Joseph Andrews. In The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews, edited by Martin C. Battestin. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.
———. “Part of Juvenal’s Sixth Satire, Modernized in Burlesque Verse.” In The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding: Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, Esq, vol. I, edited by Henry Knight Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972.
———. “The Historical Register, for the Year 1736.” In The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding: The Plays, edited by Thomas Lockwood, 3, 1734–1742. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011.
Grant, Charlotte. “‘One’s Self, and One’s House, One’s Furniture’: From Object to Interior in British Fiction, 1720–1900.” In Imagined Interiors, edited by Aynsley and Grant, 134–153. London: V&A Publications, 2006.
Greig, Hannah. “Eighteenth-Century English Interiors in Image and Text.” In Imagined Interiors: Representing the Domestic Space since the Renaissance, edited by Jeremy Aynsley and Charlotte Grant, 102–27. London: V&A Publications, 2006.
Lafler, Joanne. The Celebrated Mrs. Oldfield. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989.
Learmount, Brian. A History of the Auction. Frome and London: Barnard and Learmount, 1985.
Lipsedge, Karen. Domestic Space in Eighteenth-Century British Novels. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Llanover, Lady, ed. The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs. Delany: With Interesting Reminiscences of King George III and Queen Charlotte, vol. 3. London: Richard Bentley, 1861.
McLaverty, James. Pope, Print and Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Nussbaum, Felicity. “‘More than a Woman’: Early Memoirs of British Actresses.” In New Windows on a Woman’s World: Essays for Jocelyn Harris, edited by Colin Gibson and Lisa Marr, 225–242. Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago, 2005.
———. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
Peck, James. “Anne Oldfield’s Lady Townly: Consumption, Credit, and the Whig Hegemony of the 1720s.” Theatre Journal 49, no. 4 (1997): 397–416.
Pointon, Marcia. “Women and their Jewels.” In Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830, edited by Jennie Batchelor and Cora Kaplan, 11–30. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Pope, Alexander. “Sober Advice from Horace.” In The Poems of Alexander Pope. Volume IV. Imitations of Horace, edited by John Butt. London: Methuen & Co., 1953.
Rogers, Pat and Paul Baines. Edmund Curll: Bookseller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.
Saumarez Smith, Charles. Eighteenth-Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993.
———. The Rise of Design: Design and the Domestic Interior in Eighteenth-Century England. London: Pimlico, 2000.
Sheppard, F. H. W., ed. “Grosvenor Street: South Side.” In Survey of London: Volume 40, the Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 (The Buildings). London: London County Council, 1980.
Weatherill, Lorna. “A Possession of One’s Own: Women and Consumer Behaviour in England, 1660–1740.” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 2 (1986): 131–156.
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van Hensbergen, C. (2018). Anne Oldfield’s Domestic Interiors: Auctions, Material Culture and Celebrity. In: Jones, E., Joule, V. (eds) Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76902-8_3
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