Reviews

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Gender, Taste & Material Culture in Britain
and North America, 1700–1830
John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds). Yale University
Press, 2007, 358 pp., 82 col. and b&w illus., cloth,
£40.00. ISBN: 0 300 11659 4.

This book declares itself the fruit of a long cooperation

between scholars brought together by the British Arts
and Humanities Research Council’s funding of the
Centre for the Study of the Domestic Interior at the
Royal College of Art, and the Huntingdon Library’s
sponsorship of work in this area. It is, essentially, a
conference proceedings, growing out of an event

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which took place at the Library in May 2004. Like
most such proceedings, it is a compilation of academic
essays that express the specific research interests of
the contributors under an all-encompassing title. The
job of the editors, as so often in these circumstances,
has been to make a satisfying argument out of the
coincidences in a number of persons’ thinking.
The presence of the nebulous term ‘material cul-
ture’ in the title is suggestive of the problems the edi-
tors may well have found in making a cogent
argument out of disparate materials. As with most
such compilations, the essays vary in quality. It is
good fortune that the editors—Styles and Vickery—
are amongst the most lucid contributors. Their intro-
duction has the merit of being an interesting, and
easily digested, reflection on the state of the scholarly
debate concerning the relationship of what used to be
called ‘design’ to economic phenomena such as con-
sumerism, retailing and market choice. Much as the
essays deal more with patterns of consumption than
production, the word ‘taste’ seems to replace design.
This displacement of concepts is welcome, as it is
time that the discernment of the buyer or user was
prioritized by scholars. The problem is that the very
use of the term ‘taste’ ought to be accompanied by a
strong grasp of the philosophical discipline of aesthet-
ics. This is, by and large, not the strength of the edi-
tors or contributors. The absence of an essay by a
specialist in the history of ideas, who could sketch out
the philosophical debate on the relationship of gen-
der to taste, was a serious flaw in a book of this title.
Nevertheless, the shift towards discussing taste was
beneficial in that it allows for the exploration of
women’s role in the production of ‘material culture’.
Long has the debate on women’s part in the culture
of the arts been focused on gleaning evidence of fem-
inine production. This now seems an exhausted ter-
ritory. Historical investigation of women as
consumers, which is the subject of many of the essays,
has the advantage of being a subject that fascinated at
the time. One of the most interesting themes in the
book, therefore, is the attempt of scholars to utilize,
or see past, the moralistic debate on the evils of wom-
en’s shopping habits. Such is the entertainment value
of original sources of this kind, and so obvious the
lines of critical debate which proceed from their
analysis, that the editors have a far easier job defining
the contribution of this book to gender studies than
to any other of the stipulated themes.
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The general emphasis of this book is on the study
of society, conceived in predictably Marxian terms as
a site of gender, race and class friction. It is on this
level that it is designed to appeal. Part of the enjoy-
ment of the book is to witness the zeal of feminist
scholars in dispensing an obvious ideological obliga-
tion: to enthuse about the rise of women as discern-
ing consumers and to discount any suggestion that
contemporary critics (largely males) had a point when
they observed negative consequences in this phe-
nomenon. The general result of these deliberations is
exactly what could be expected before opening the
book: that the women of the past are absolved from
the blame attached by a misogynist discourse and
those who constructed this discourse are exposed as
mythmakers. It is interesting to observe that leftist
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scholars have traditionally been ideologically com-
mitted to a critical, and sometimes negative, reading
of consumerism, as a manifestation of the evils of
capitalism. This is one of the reasons why, for instance,
the so-called ‘luxury debate’ of the eighteenth cen-
tury has been so enthusiastically received by scholars
of the social history of design and art. Female con-
sumerism, however, is now considered beyond moral
taint of association with ‘luxury’, in as far as the
agency of criticism is deemed to be misogyny and,
therefore, plain wrong. The danger, which is felt at
several junctures in this book, is that male shoppers
remain subject to the moral criticism levelled by their
contemporaries, whereas female shopping is regarded
in hindsight as a purely positive phenomenon
whereby women discovered a new sphere in which
to exercise rational discernment or ‘taste’.
The text is divided into sections with vague one-
word titles: ‘space’, ‘politics’ and ‘people’. The latter
category, which is close to meaningless, brings into
question the wisdom of these subdivisions. One of
these titles, ‘space’, is tackled with purpose. Although
a fashionable, and suitably vacant, term, this is more
than a title of convenience. That the chapters on space
come first in the book signals the important move-
ment of architectural history, and ‘the history of the
interior’, into mainstream debates on the social moti-
vations of consumers. Formerly, the social history of
consumer imperatives was concentrated on movable
‘goods’, at the expense of immobile architecture. It is
significant, however, that, in taking into consider-
ation the social functions of buildings, the term archi-
tecture seems to be dismissed. The replacement of the
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study of architecture with the sociological analysis of
‘spaces’ seems, from the evidence of this book, to be
a movement with positive and negative consequences.
It is welcome to find historians of the eighteenth
century making a concerted attempt to address ques-
tions of social function. Nonetheless, it is alarming to
see that this address brings with it a culture in which
impenetrable sociological jargon is tolerated, even
encouraged. To my taste, the contributions of Ber-
nard Herman and Robert Blair St George contain a
plethora of pretentious phraseology. It is important
when opening up an interesting debate to be inclu-
sive. Unfortunately, some academics feel obliged to
use language which immediately closes off debate
to all but the most intellectually self-conscious of
readers. One cringes internally when faced, for
example, with references to ‘this narrative material-
ity or ‘languaged thingness’’ (p. 102). The way for-
ward is shown by the essay of Karen Lipsedge on
the woman’s ‘ closet ’ , which is comprehensible,
readable, clear in its organization and cogent in its
argument.
Styles’ and Vickery’s Introduction begins with the
promise to discuss the Atlantic Empire as an ‘Empire
of Goods’. Only one of these essays, a strong account
by Linzy Brekke of the politics of dress during the
American Revolution, comprises a significant address
of this subject. That the book covers Britain and
North America is more reflective of the coincidence
of the inclusion of contributors from British and
American universities than any sustained exploration
of the past economic and cultural links between the
two cultures. This book, therefore, constitutes a
good opportunity to compare the two cultures of
scholarship. One of the strongest indications is that
the British historians of ‘material culture’ are more
comfortable with constructing a closely argued
account of important new documentary evidence.
The essays of Styles, Vickery, Walsh and Retford are
indicative of an emphatic preference for a kind of
history of material culture that is formed around, and
true to the spirit of, a body of important manuscript
material or group of printed sources. Their refusal to
resort to bland, though superficially impressive, gener-
alities contrasts with, for instance, Ann Smart Martin’s
essay on ribbons in America. A constant resort to
rhetorical questions, which are barely addressed
thereafter, is accompanied by the disconcerting com-
bination of abrupt assertions and wordy generaliza-
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tions: ‘Social position mattered. Ribbons mattered
too. Analysis of them takes us to multiple meanings
and relationships, some filled with the excitement of
fashionable firsts or sexual entanglement’ (p. 186).
Informing an initiated reader that objects had ‘mul-
tiple meanings’ constitutes a platitude. The benefits
of repeating such wisdom were also felt by Herman
who informs us of the ‘instabilities of meanings in the
unsteady world of eighteenth-century urban society’
(p. 57). These are fine reminders of the enthusiasm
for ‘polyvalence’ and performing ‘readings’ that char-
acterizes current literary criticism published under
the guise of history. The rhetoric of ‘multiple mean-
ings’ can, however, act to divert attention away from
the absence of a clear interpretative relationship to a
body of evidence: the main problem with three
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American essays in this volume.
In conclusion, this book is intended less as a work
of revisionism than as a plea for the more nuanced
and demanding address of ‘material culture’. We are
now some decades away from the foundations of
the discussion of eighteenth-century art and design
in terms of a ‘Consumer Revolution’. John Styles’
argument for a more sophisticated attitude towards
the development of consumerism—the replacement
of a narrative of ‘revolution’ with that of complex
‘evolution’—is now well established. This book
reveals a more general determination on the part of
most British, and some American, scholars to be
more subtle in the address of evidence when writ-
ing about ‘material culture’. It is important, how-
ever, to note that this demand for sophistication is
largely to allow for the more aggressive pursuit of
the usual leftist academic preoccupations: class, gen-
der and race. On this level, the book is entirely con-
formist. It mounts the obligatory hobbyhorses with
aplomb.
The book, therefore, constitutes a new perspective
on the kind of issues that we expect to concern the
student of ‘material culture’. Kate Retford’s excellent
article in this volume, for example, shows that there
is considerable potential in improving our encounter
with the much written about subject of eighteenth-
century portraiture as an instrument of ‘patriarchy’.
Styles’ article also presents a strong case for the closest
possible study of classes of poorer consumers who
were insufficiently considered by the earliest scholars
of British consumerism in the eighteenth century.
These are knowing, original and well-organized
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reflections on established themes. It is a tribute to

them that they leave the reader questioning where
the historical debate on consumerism can go beyond
such exacting standards.

Matthew Craske doi:10.1093/jdh/epn014

Department of History of Art
Oxford Brookes University

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