The 18th century has been hailed for its revolution in consumer culture, but Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain repositions Britain as a nation of makers. It brings new attention to 18th-century craftswomen and men with its focus on the material knowledge possessed not only by professional artisans and amateur makers, but also by skilled consumers. This book gathers together a group of interdisciplinary scholars working in the fields of art history, history, literature and museum studies to unearth the tactile and tacit knowledge that underpinned fashion, tailoring and textile production. It invites us into the workshops, drawing rooms and backrooms of a broad range of creators, and uncovers how production and manual knowledge extended beyond the factories and machines which dominate industrial histories.
This book illuminates, for the first time, the material literacies learnt, enacted and understood by British producers and consumers. The skills required for sewing, embroidering and the textile arts were possessed by a large proportion of the British population: men, women and children, professional and amateur alike. Building on previous studies of shoppers and consumption in the period, as well as narratives of manufacture, this collection documents the multiplicity of small producers behind Britain's consumer revolution, reshaping our understanding of the dynamics between making and objects, consumption and production. It demonstrates how material knowledge formed an essential part of daily life for eighteenth-century Britons. Craft technique, practice and production, the contributors show, constituted forms of tactile languages that joined makers together, whether they produced objects for profit or pleasure.
Dyer, Serena: - Serena Dyer is Lecturer in History of Design & Material Culture at De Montfort University. She has taught at the University of Warwick and the University of Hertfordshire, and was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She was previously Curator of the Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture. She has published on albums, wallpaper, consumer culture, and childhood in the 18th century. Her book, Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century, was published by Bloomsbury in 2021.
Smith, Chloe Wigston: - Chloe Wigston Smith is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. She is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the 18th-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2013), as well as articles on women in literature, material culture studies and fashion culture. Her current British Academy funded project looks at domestic crafts in the Atlantic world.
Yonan, Michael: - Michael Yonan is Professor of Art History/Alan Templeton Endowed Chair in European Art, 1600-1830 at the University of California at Davis, USA. His research concentrates on eighteenth-century European art, particularly in Central Europe and Scandinavia; on the decorative arts, and on the theory and practice of material culture studies. With Stacey Sloboda he has co-edited Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Local and Global Geographies of Art for Bloomsbury Academic.
