Introduction

Summary

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?