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On average, Sarah Mellish’s account book suggests that she usually spent between a quarter and a half of her yearly expenditure on clothing (Table 1). This expenditure fluctuated yearly, and according to how much she had spent in total. Purchases of mourning dress in 1710 and 1714 reflected an expensive investment, while unusually high expenditure…

As we have seen, the household as a unit of accounting has received the most attention from scholars who usually focus on married or widowed women. Though some studies have tackled the domestic consumption of unmarried women, their relationship to the household remains underexplored. 42 As Tanya Evans points out, widows and single women need…

This focus on the household is partly the result of eighteenth-century advice manuals which often stated that women needed only a rudimentary working knowledge of accounting in order to manage household resources effectively when they married. 22 As John Richard Edwards has shown, by the eighteenth century commercial accounting was gendered as exclusively male by…

This chapter continues to focus on detailed description by exploring the act of accounting, looking at individual, family, and household expenditure. Chapter 3 considers accounting in an institutional context. Looking across the accounts kept by seven women spanning 1705 to 1803, this chapter first considers how women’s clothing appears in and across their account books…

What is clear is that women were more likely to leave bequests of clothing than were men, though this was not unique to the period as a similar pattern has been observed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wills. 45 They were also overwhelmingly more likely to leave clothing to other women than to the men in…

Of these 530 women, 401 left wills and it is important to note that, of those who did, less than a third mentioned clothing in some way. This includes women bequeathing individual items to specific recipients, women requesting that their clothing be sold to cover final debts, widows bequeathing their late husband’s clothing, and women…

Wills have been interpreted as valuable evidence for women’s affective attachments both to people and to their possessions. Maxine Berg has been particularly influential in arguing that ‘bequests show us that women to a far higher degree than men noticed their possessions, attached value and emotional significance to these’, while Marcia Pointon has similarly suggested…

To look across the social hierarchy, the book draws on a wide range of both manuscript and printed sources that have rarely been considered together, including account books, bills and receipts, court records, correspondence, newspaper advertisements, probate records, and administrative records of the old poor law. Discussion throughout pays careful attention to the circumstances of…

My primary focus is on the written word, whether in pen and ink or printed, but with an awareness that this cannot be divorced from the wider material world it was used to describe. Written descriptions do not reflect the sum of knowledge about women’s clothing and textiles, and were not its only or perhaps…

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. More importantly, what did it mean to consumers themselves? Much work has devoted its energies to addressing these questions, and the response has largely…