Conclusion

Summary

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.