The shift towards lighter fabrics, new mixes of silk and wool, and changes in fashion unsettled the social hierarchy of dress and threatened confusion. Elizabethans started to complain about servants sporting coats made of the finest cloth and hose dyed with Flanders dye. In his Description of England (1577–87), William Harrison yearned nostalgically for a time when an Englishman had been known abroad by his own cloth and, at home, contented himself with wearing simple woollen clothes. But, he acknowledged, those days were gone for good:
Such is our mutability that to-day there is none to the Spanish guise, to-morrow the French toys are most fine and delectable . . . by-and-by the Turkish manner is generally best liked of, otherwise . . . the short French breeches make such a comely vesture that, except it were a dog in a doublet, you shall not see any so disguised as are my countrymen of England.
It had come to a point ‘that women are become men, and men transformed into monsters’. So enthralled by fashion and constant change were his countrymen that Harrison prayed to ‘God that in this behalf our sin be not like unto that of Sodom and Gomorrah’.98
Under the Stuarts in the early seventeenth century, the elite picked up where their Italian Renaissance counterparts had left off, amassing art, books and antiquities and mingling in shopping halls such as the New Exchange in London, opened by James I in 1609.99 Less magnificent but more consequential were mundane changes that reached across society to produce elements of mass consumption. New, cheap products made their appearance. The knitting frame made it possible to mass produce stockings, in a growing variety of types and patterns. Gregory King in 1688 estimated that 10 million pairs of stockings were bought a year, or two pairs per person.100 There were clay pipes, pins and white soap, brass and steel thimbles. These were made in small workshops and show how wrong it is to assume that mass consumption needed factory-style mass production. In the home, the move from wood to coal led to the introduction of saucepans and kettles that could be placed directly on a stove or grate instead of having to be hung over the fire. Pottery, too, was becoming more versatile and widespread. When Daniel Defoe stepped into a ‘large hollow Cave’ in Derbyshire inhabited by a poor lead miner and his family in 1727, he was surprised to find ‘shelves with earthen ware, and some pewter and brass’.101
Not everything was new. In Stuart England, the upper gentry continued to eat a lot of beef and go hawking, as in medieval times. For them, shopping trips to London coexisted with home production and gift-giving through an extensive patronage network of yeomen, tutors and wet nurses looking for work and support. In that sense, consumption was part of a labour exchange as much as a purchase in a marketplace. Still, even where products were not intrinsically new, they often came in a growing number of varieties. In the first half of the seventeenth century, for example, Lady Alice Le Strange of Hunstanton, in Norfolk, bought sixty-two different kinds of fabric, including fine linen cloth from the Netherlands, Spanish cloth, linen damask, plush (an expensive silk velvet), satin, camlet (a soft angora wool), plain woollen broadcloth and ‘best scarlet’, a singularly expensive type of wool. The Le Stranges first bought a piece of Indian cotton in 1623 – a calico border for one of Alice’s gowns. Their beds were dressed in black velvet and gold, crimson damask and scarlet as well as in the new draperies made in England, such as the so-called jollyboys, and decorated with Indian nicanee cotton. This household belonged to the upper five hundred of the kingdom – Sir Hamon was a knight – and spent in excess of £2,000 a year. But, however privileged, the Le Stranges were not living in a world apart. There was no sharp antithesis between old luxury and modern novelty, which is sometimes thought to have separated the aristocracy from merchants and shopkeepers – at least not in England. Gentry families like the Le Stranges also ate off pewter plates and were drawn to some of the same new tastes and products that circulated in commercial society at large, such as the lighter, new draperies and Indian cotton.102
New goods began to spread even more rapidly after 1700. Inventories give a snapshot of the gathering momentum. In 1675, no household in London owned china or utensils for tea and coffee. By 1725, 35 per cent owned the former, and 60 per cent the latter. In the earlier year, one in every ten households had a clock, pictures and some earthenware. By the latter, every second home did.103 In Tudor times, curtains, cottons and looking glasses could generally be found only in the homes of local elites. On his death in 1554, Thomas Harrison, a Southampton girdler (belt-maker) and bailiff, owned ‘painted curtains’ for the window in his chamber. His parlour included a bed with yellow curtains of saye, a fine-textured cloth resembling serge.104 By the 1720s, such furnishings were a common sight, facilitated by a new room plan. Beds left the parlour, which now assumed its modern purpose as a room reserved for socializing and entertaining.
The new material culture did not reach all parts of England with the same speed. In some ways, progress was so uneven that it created two nations. In London, Bath and Liverpool people sipped tea behind drawn curtains in 1700, but such novelties were virtually unseen in Cornwall as late as 1750. Still, new goods reached well beyond cities. They appeared in Kentish villages close to London as well as in industrializing Yorkshire and colonial Virginia. The transition from stool to chair and from chest to drawers and wardrobes was a provincial and colonial as well as a metropolitan story. Comfort, however, rarely arrived in one block. For most, it involved trade-offs. In England, the same worker who enjoyed tea, put up curtains and retired to a feather bed often suffered from malnutrition and damp. In the United States in the 1790s, travellers noted how their Virginia hostesses sat on handsome furniture, elegantly dressed, but served drink in broken glasses while the wind whistled through cracked windows.105 The eighteenth century prioritized highly visible and immediate forms of consumption – dress, furnishings and tea sets – over hidden pipes, baths and utilities.
Inventories, inevitably, give a distorted picture of the ownership of goods across society as a whole, since they are heavily clustered around the gentry, traders and professions. One needs to own goods to make an inventory in the first place. Fortunately, some parishes had an interest in recording the possessions of the poor as part of a bargain that allowed an indebted person who was entering a workhouse to keep his belongings until the end of his life in exchange for leaving them to the parish thereafter. It comes as no surprise that in eighteenth-century Essex fewer paupers had clocks (20 per cent) and looking glasses (27 per cent) than did artisans and traders (71 per cent and 62 per cent). What is remarkable, however, is that half the paupers owned tea-related items, feather bedding and candlesticks, well in line with the rate among tradesmen. While some paupers owned nothing, poverty no longer barred the door to the world of things for all.
The more fortunate labourer John Tadgell occupied a dwelling room with two additional chambers with his wife and two children in 1810. Each of the two chambers had a four-poster bed with feather bedding. In the dwelling room he kept tea cups, glasses and crockery, sixty-seven pieces in all, plus a set of sixteen Delft plates. Together with a mahogany tea chest and a long oak table with plenty of chairs, here were all the basic requirements of a new culture of politeness and sociability.106 Tadgell’s possessions may have eclipsed those of the average labourer, but they do suggest how goods and comforts began to enter the homes of ordinary Britons as well as those of the middle and upper classes. Those who did not own such goods directly often had access to them as servants or lodgers. By the late eighteenth century, tea kettles, curtains, feather beds and looking glasses were all customary in London lodging houses.107 Visitors from other parts of Europe were routinely impressed by the well-dressed appearance of the London poor – not ‘even a beggar, without both a shirt, and shoes and stockings’, the German writer Karl Philipp Moritz noted in 1782. This was in stark contrast with the shoeless poor in Berlin and Paris, or, for that matter, in Dublin and Glasgow.108
New clothes and a culture of self-fashioning had a ripple effect across the imperial economy, a
ll the way to those who had been reduced to chattels themselves. Unlike the mother country, the American colonies kept sumptuary laws alive. The 1735 South Carolina Negro Act forbade negroes to wear their masters’ cast-off clothes and restricted them to white Welsh plains and other cheap fabrics. Such legislation proved increasingly difficult to enforce, partly because masters used dress to buy loyalty, partly because slaves were asserting themselves as consumers, spending the little hard-earned money they made from raising chickens or growing cotton on the side on silk ribbons and looking glasses. In 1777, Charles Wakefield of Maryland offered eighty silver dollars for the return of his house-slaves Dick and Lucy. The advertisement identified their wardrobe on the run. Dick had taken with him not only a ‘pair of Russia drab overalls’ but also ‘a green cloth coat, with a crimson velvet cape, a red plush [coat], with blue cuffs and cape, a deep blue camblet jacket, with gold lace at the sleeves, down the breast and round the collar . . . [and] a pair of pumps and buckles’. In addition to several petticoats, Lucy had with her two cotton gowns, ‘one purple and white, the other red and white’, a ‘jacket, and black silk bonnet, a variety of handkerchiefs and ruffles . . . a pair of high heel shoes, a pair of kid gloves and a pair of silk mitts, [and] a blue sarsenet [soft silk] handkerchief, trim’d with gauze, with white ribbon sew’d to it’.109 Such apparel was very different from that worn by slaves fifty years earlier.
The fashionable novelty par excellence was cotton, and by following its rise to prominence over the next few pages we can appreciate more fully the attributes of an emerging new consumer culture: its aesthetic appeal and variety; its cheapness and practicality; the consequences for more frequent changes and combination with accessories; and marketing and the creation of a fashion system that integrated consumers and producers living on different continents (see Plate 6).
Spain’s colonial ventures in the New World and European trade with China had already introduced a transoceanic commerce of silk and wool in the sixteenth century. Spain took silver from the Americas and sent them cloth from Castile. The Manila galleons which sailed annually from the Philippines to Acapulco after 1579 brought both raw silk and dyed, embroidered pieces to the New World; the Spanish also planted mulberry trees in Mexico to grow silkworms on the spot. In Peru, indigenous weavers, alongside skilled migrants from the old world, turned wool and silk into tapestries with Chinese floral motifs and red-blue ponchos with a green phoenix. New hybrids made their appearance, blending traditional garments like the Andean lliclla, or shawl and the anacu, a wrapped dress, with Chinese silk and Castilian damask. In Quito, in 1596, the wardrobe of Maria de Amores – an affluent lady of Inca and Ecuadorian descent twice married to Spanish husbands – included one Chinese lliclla, another made of green Castilian damask with golden edging, and an anacu of green Castilian satin with a golden edging; she also owned a ‘large Chinese porcelain’.110
Cotton, however, was the first truly global mass consumer good. Indian dyed cottons had been sent to East Africa in the eleventh century, and been carried deep into Asia. By the second half of the seventeenth century they were sold across Europe and the Ottoman empire, but it was in England that they first reached the middling sort and then the masses. In 1664, the English East India Company (EIC) shipped a quarter of a million pieces of cloth to England. Twenty years later, it shipped over a million. Designs that flopped in London found ready buyers in the empire, circulating all the way to trading stations near the Arctic Circle in Canada. Chintzes – that is, cottons hand-printed in India – put a splash of colour into people’s wardrobes. In England at that time, some linens were block printed in imitation of Italian silk damask, but these could not rival the more sophisticated Indian designs. Cotton took colour much better than linen and could be washed without losing its shine, unlike textiles dyed in Europe. Printed cottons offered fashionable dress and vivid designs at an affordable price; the European alternative of wool patterned on the loom was far more expensive. Colourful chintzes, ‘the ware of Gentlewomen in Holland’, the EIC noted in 1683, were worn by the middling sort in England – the wives and daughters of merchants, traders, lawyers, manufacturers, clergymen, officers and farmers who occupied the middle strata of society between the landed aristocracy and the working masses.111
Indian cottons threatened local wool, linen and silk industries, which led to a virtually European-wide ban on calico (France: 1689; Spain: 1713; Britain: 1700 and 1721; Russia: 1744); only the Netherlands stood apart. In Spitalfields, London, in 1719–20, women had their calico dresses torn off their backs by rioting silk weavers. But prohibition failed to kill the ‘calico craze’ – quite the opposite. Manufacturers circumvented the ban by mixing cotton and linen. East India Company ships would arrive in the port of London and be boarded by textile workers who turned the calico cloth into shirts and handkerchiefs and then sold the finished articles illegally on land. Officers and sailors tried to bring calico into the country, concealed among their private possessions; British diplomats and foreign ambassadors, too, were not infrequently found smuggling silk into England. And cotton was part of the wider smuggling network, alongside spirits, tea, tobacco and other taxed goods. In 1783, the Parliamentary Committee on Illicit Practices noted how, on entry, calicoes and linens were often hidden among other goods, mixed with those already stamped by the excise, or stamped with a counterfeit mark; in France, similarly, Asian textiles were unloaded and sold in Lorient before they had been inventoried. Smuggling gangs liked cotton because the prohibition made it particularly profitable on the black market. In the port of London alone, 4,099 pieces of calico and muslin were seized in 1780, giving a sense of the large volume of contraband goods that went undetected. In 1783, the House of Commons estimated several hundred coastal vessels were involved, from 30 to 300 tons, carrying crews armed ‘with clubs and heavy whips, generally inflamed with liquor, and assembled in such numbers as to reduce the revenue officers to be quiet spectators of the proceeding’. Scouts and riders set up signals for the boats, then loaded the cargo on to wagons and headed to London and provincial towns with fake permits.112
The ban on cotton might appear reactionary but it also illustrates how far the spirit of the sumptuary laws had been left behind. The authorities no longer cared whether ordinary housewives sported the colours or fabrics of aristocratic ladies. The issue was where the product was made, not who bought it. The ban was a textbook example of how an infant industry could be nurtured behind a shelter. Its main objective was to help the domestic linen and silk industries, but in due course it built up a powerful British cotton industry. British producers used the protection from foreign competition to develop new fabrics, to copy and to innovate, until by the late eighteenth century they surpassed their Indian rivals in the Gujarat and along the Coromandel Coast.113 The ban was initially on cottons printed and painted in India (1701) and was then extended, in 1722, to those printed in Britain. But it did not cover fabrics mixed with cotton. By the 1730s, most linen in Manchester was mixed with cotton into fustian. Colourfast printing with copperplates – first developed by Francis Nixon in Ireland in 1752 – and the rotary printing machine in 1783 finally gave British cotton masters the edge over Indian cottons printed by hand. In 1774, Britain rescinded its ban on printed cotton. Twenty-five years later, it consumed some 29 million yards of home-produced cotton cloth.
We speak of cotton in the singular, but for contemporaries the appeal lay in its variety as much as its novelty. Cotton was traded in two hundred types and offered unprecedented versatility. And this confronted shoppers with an entirely new burden of choice. How was a customer to distinguish between all the various fabrics, their uses, quality and price? The arrival of consumer guides is indicative of the transformation under way. The Merchant’s Ware-House Laid Open (London, 1696; just before the import ban was imposed) offered an A–Z survey of Indian cottons and European textiles aimed at ‘all sorts of Persons’, starting with Alcomore-holland, a Dutch flax, and ending with Vehemounty, a French fabric. The
greater the variety, the more easily people were cheated. Ascertaining quality by appearance was difficult. Some cloth looked lovely in a shop, ‘yet wear like Paper’, while others ‘look well to the Eye, but . . . falls into pieces’ in the first wash. Readers were told how to avoid deception by ‘the most crafty Dealer’. Long cloth, that is, cotton up to 40 yards in length, used for shirts and shifts, sold for 15 pence a yard. It came in two kinds: one from India, which was then dyed in England; and the other, which arrived ready-dyed. It was best to avoid the former and pick the latter because ‘they never lose the colour in washing as the English-dye cloth.’ How would a customer spot the difference in a shop? Answer: ‘you may know the English-dye from the Indian by the colours, for the Indian dye is much evener dyed than the English, for the English hath brown and dark spots in it.’ ‘Mulmuls’, a kind of muslin or plain-woven fabric, was even worse in the view of the author: ‘very thin . . . generally fray’d, and it not only wears extraordinary ill, but when washed two or three times, wears very yellow’. It was commonly sold at a precious price by hawkers, ‘but in the wear is a perfect Cheat’. Among the many colourful chintzes, it was important to distinguish between the very fine ones, painted with birds and beasts, which ‘retain their colours till they are worn to pieces’, and the chintz serunge, somewhat ‘coarser, yet . . . of very pretty Flowers’ that kept their colours equally well and were perfectly good for gowns and petticoats as well as quilts.114
By the late eighteenth century, the clothing revolution was in full swing. Silk remained France’s most valuable textile export and Britain sent growing volumes of it to North America and Jamaica as well as to Denmark and Norway. Virginian ladies liked a bit of rococo, too. In England, silk lost some of its exclusiveness, as tradesmen began to sport silk waistcoats and breeches. At the other end of the market, linen remained cheap and hung on as underwear for a little while longer. But for outerwear, cotton was increasingly becoming the norm and people were prepared to pay slightly more than for the cheaper but also duller linen, although the poor would switch to cotton only in the next century. In France, by the time of the Revolution in 1789, artisans, shopkeepers and servants all wore more cotton than wool or linen; it was only in the wardrobe of aristocrats and the professions that it was beaten into second place by silk. By this time, cotton had also outpaced silk in New York and Philadelphia. Unlike in the case of watches, where rising consumption was the child of new technology and lower prices, cotton was a textbook example of how fashion was the decisive driver of demand. And once artisans and servants, too, were wearing cotton, their superiors began to look for more elegant and expensive cotton stockings.115
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