Abstract
In 1696, an anonymous English merchant ‘J.F.’ produced a small volume, The Merchant’s Warehouse Laid Open: Or, the Plain Dealing Linnen-Draper. He dedicated this book to Princess Ann of Denmark.1 The encomium he offered the princess speaks to J.F.’s political proclivities; he evidently supported the insurgent Protestant Whig dynasty now on England’s throne. Perhaps he was also one of the newly rich that had profited from Whig political connections, as commerce was of high concern to the new regime. J.F. was certainly a seasoned commercial man, well versed in the international traffic in textiles, both goods produced in Europe and those transported from Asia by English fleets. The East India Company specialised in the importation of Indian textiles to Europe after 1660 and J.F. clearly responded to the local retail changes that resulted from this project.2 The volume he wrote was slim but its ambitions were large and reflect the transformational processes under way in England’s markets and English homes, as more varieties and larger quantities of cloth were purchased and employed in studied ways. The transmission of quilts and quilt culture illustrate this material innovation. Indian quilts modelled a new form of comfort, being striking visual and sensual additions that demanded new skills in textile management, such as J.F. aimed to provide. Learning to consume successfully and attending to the new material culture of the home are the focuses of this chapter.
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Notes
J.F. (1696) The Merchant’s Ware-House Laid Open: Or, the Plain Dealing Linnen-Draper (London), in B. Lemire (ed.) (2009) The British Cotton Trade, vol. 1 (London: Pickering & Chatto), p. 211.
J. de Vries (2003) ‘Connecting Europe and Asia. A quantitative analysis of the Cape Route trade, 1497–1795’, in Dennis Flynn, Arturo Giraldo and Richard von Glahn (eds) Global Connections and Monetary History, 1470–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. 65.
The Dutch Republic has been singled out by a range of authors, claiming for this region a distinctive material culture and trajectory of material change. However, it is worth recognising the common features shared in the first instance across the Low Countries as well as in other regions of north-west Europe. S. Schama (1988) The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press)
and for the wider perspective see J. de Vries (2008) The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press).
J. Crowley (2001) The Invention of Comfort: Sensibility and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
D. Roche (1994) The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancient Régime, trans. by J. Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 152–4.
The rise of textile consumption in the European home is discussed in: G. Riello (2009) ‘Fabricating the domestic: the material culture of textiles and the social life of the home in early modern Europe’, in B. Lemire (ed.) The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society: Global Perspectives from Early Modern to Contemporary Times (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 47–57.
T. Parke Hughes (2005) Human-built World: How to Think About Technology and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), pp. 4–5.
K.N. Chaudhuri (1978) The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 96–7, 282.
de Vries, Industrious Revolution, p. 155. Equally thoughtful on this subject is J. Styles (2000) ‘Product Innovation in Early Modern London’, Past & Present, 168, pp. 132–40.
M. Berg (2004) ‘In Pursuit of luxury: global history and British consumer goods in the eighteenth century’, Past & Present, 182, p. 94.
C. Walsh (1999) ‘Shops, shopping and the art of decision making in eighteenth century England’ in J. Styles and A. Vickery (eds) Gender, Taste and Material Culture in England and North America, 1700–1830 (London: Yale University Press), pp. 151–77.
Walsh,’ shops, shopping’, pp. 162; and N. Cox (2000) The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 127–45.
Some common deficiencies in textile production are discussed in J. Styles (1983) ‘Embezzlement, industry and the law in England, 1500–1800’ in M. Berg, P. Hudson and M. Sonenscher (eds) Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 173–210.
Cookbooks and manuals of household management were published in England from the later 1500s. J. Thirsk (2007) Food in Early Modern England: Phases, Fads, Fashion 1500–1760 (London: Hambledon Continuum), pp. 49–57, 104–13.
The social and gender reverberations of all manner of books in early modern England has been extensively researched, including religious instructional guides and other discursive materials. For example, E. Snook, (2005) Women, Reading, and the Cultural Politics of Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing)
N. Tadmor (1996) ‘“In the even my wife read to me”: Women, reading and household life in the eighteenth century’ in J. Raven, H. Small and N. Tadmor (eds) The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 162–74.
J. Crowley (1999) ‘The sensibility of comfort’, American Historical Review, 104, pp. 749–82 and Crowley (2001) Invention of Comfort.
For a literary assessment see: D. Biow (2006) The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
B. van Bavel and O. Gelderblom, (2009) ‘The economic origins of cleanliness in the Dutch Golden Age’, Past & Present 205, pp. 41–69.
B. Lemire (2005) The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England 1600–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
J. Whittle and E. Griffiths (2012) Consumption & Gender in the Early Seventeenth-Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 114–5.
M. Overton, J. Whittle, D. Dean and A. Hann (2004) Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (London: Routledge), pp. 110–13, 125
L. Weatherill (1988) Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London: Routledge), pp. 159–61.
E. Katz (1994) “Foreword” in The Influentials: People Who Influence People, by Gabriel Weimann (SUNY, Albany: SUNY Press), pp. ix–xii.
G. Vigarello (1988) Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
The shifting temporal understanding of cleanliness is discussed by K. Ashenburg (2007) The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History (Toronto: Random House), pp. 1–13.
T. Maldonado and J. Cullars (1991) ‘The idea of comfort’, Design Issues, 8, p. 39.
The only book published to date on the English laundress begins in the mid Victorian period: Malcolmson English Laundresses. Also, P.E. Malcolmson (1981) ‘Laundresses and the Laundry Trade in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 24, pp. 439–62.
2330, Orphans Inventory, 11 August 1699. London Metropolitan Archives. For a full discussion of the spread of quilt culture from India through the West see, B. Lemire (2011) Cotton (Oxford: Berg Publishers), chapter 5.
B. Lemire (1991) Fashion’s Favourite: the Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press) and Cotton
P. O’Brien, T. Griffiths and P. Hunt (1991) ‘Political components of the Industrial Revolution: Parliament and the English cotton textile industry, 1660–1774’, Economic History Review, 44, pp. 395–423.
J. Styles (2006) ‘Lodging at the Old Bailey: Lodgings and their furnishing in eighteenth-century London’ in J. Styles and A. Vickery (eds) Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and America, 1700–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 61–80.
C. Browne (2010) ‘Making and using quilts in eighteenth-century Britain’ in S. Prichard (ed.) Quilts 1700–2010: Hidden Histories, Untold Stories (London: V&A Publishing), pp. 24–48.
For the declining price of textiles over the long eighteenth century see: C. Shammas (1994) ‘The Decline of Textile Prices in England and British America Prior to Industrialization’, Economic History Review, 47, pp. 483–507.
K. Berenson (2011) Marseille, The Cradle of White Corded Quilting (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press)
and for the persistence of white-work whole-cloth quilting in northern England see: D. Osler (2000) North Country Quilts: Legend and Living Tradition (Barnard Castle, UK: Bowes Museum).
Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Friday, 11 April 1777. For a discussion of such household auctions see S. Pennell (2010) ‘“All but the Kitchen sink”: household sales and the circulation of second-hand goods in early modern England’, in J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds) Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 37–56.
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© 2014 Beverly Lemire
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Lemire, B. (2014). An Education in Comfort: Indian Textiles and the Remaking of English Homes over the Long Eighteenth Century. In: Stobart, J., Blondé, B. (eds) Selling Textiles in the Long Eighteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295217_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295217_2
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