Small Things in the Eighteenth Century
The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature

Playful, useful, decorative, revolutionary: small things possess a rich array of meanings, from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Chloe Wigston Smith (Edited by), Beth Fowkes Tobin (Edited by)

9781108834452, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 September 2022

280 pages
25 x 17.7 x 2.5 cm, 0.77 kg

Small Things in the Eighteenth Century makes an important contribution to cultural history by focusing its readers on the myriad little details that comprised the period's material world. Gewgaws and luxuries as small as a wampum bead, ant, or punctuation mark, as common as a button or as rare as a medal, as complete as a miniature portrait or as fragmented as a glass shard—minute items that could be seen, held, treasured, lost, and traded become a means of measuring crucial developments at home and around the globe. The interdisciplinary expertise of the contributors provides a lively diversity of perspectives on the practical and symbolic meanings of each small thing. Melinda Rabb, Brown University

Offering an intimate history of how small things were used, handled, and worn, this collection shows how objects such as mugs and handkerchiefs were entangled with quotidian practices and rituals of bodily care. Small things, from tiny books to ceramic trinkets and toothpick cases, could delight and entertain, generating tactile pleasures for users while at the same time signalling the limits of the body's adeptness or the hand's dexterity. Simultaneously, the volume explores the striking mobility of small things: how fans, coins, rings, and pottery could, for instance, carry political, philosophical, and cultural concepts into circumscribed spaces. From the decorative and playful to the useful and performative, such small things as tea caddies, wampum beads, and drawings of ants negotiated larger political, cultural, and scientific shifts as they transported aesthetic and cultural practices across borders, via nationalist imagery, gift exchange, and the movement of global goods.

Introduction: The Scale and Sense of Small Things Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin
Part I. Reading Small Things: 1. “The sum of All in All”: The miniature book and the nature of legibility Abigail Williams
2. Nuts, flies, thimbles, and thumbs: Eighteenth-century children's literature and scale Katherine Wakely-Mulroney
3. Gothic syntax Cynthia Wall
4. Small, familiar things on trial and on stage Chloe Wigston Smith
Part II. Small Things in Time and Space: 5. On the smallness of numismatic objects Crystal B. Lake
6. Crinoidal limestone and Staffordshire teapots: Material and temporal scales in eighteenth-century Britain Kate Smith
7. “Joineriana”: The small fragments and parts of eighteenth-century assemblages Freya Gowrley
8. “Pray what a pox are those damned strings of Wampum?”: British understandings of Wampum in the eighteenth century Robbie Richardson
Part III. Small Things at Hand: 9. “We bought a guillotine neatly done in bone”: Illicit industries on board British prison hulks, 1775–1815 Anna McKay
10. “What number?”: Reform, authority, and identity in late-eighteenth-century military buttons Matthew Keagle
11. Two men's leather letter cases: Mercantile pride and hierarchies of display Pauline Rushton
12. The aesthetic of smallness: Chelsea porcelain seal trinkets and Britain's global gaze, 1750–1775 Patricia F. Ferguson
13. “Small gifts foster friendship”: Hortense de Beauharnais, amateur art, and the politics of exchange in post-revolutionary France Marina Kliger
Part IV. Small Things on the Move: 14. Hooke's ant Tita Chico
15. Portable patriotism: Britannia and material nationhood in miniature Serena Dyer
16. Revolutionary histories in small things: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette on printed ceramics, c. 1793–1796 Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth
17. A box of tea and the British Empire Romita Ray
18. Afterword: A thing's perspective Hanneke Grootenboer.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]