Widow Pratt's World of Goods:Implications of Consumer Choice in Colonial Newport, Rhode Island
The material world of Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and trader in eighteenth-century Newport, was part of on-the-ground mechanisms through which individuals propagated complex and contingent early modern transformations, in particular those associated with social values and the material culture of daily life. This study of Elizabeth Pratt has considered dressing the body; dining and drinking; and experiences of landscape and architecture as active engagements by an individual with a material world. Interdisciplinary study of Pratt's possessions and decision making suggests that she did not emulate well-to-do neighbors, nor did she make the same choices as other middling property owners in the town. Pratt's choices speak to developing middling discourses of consumerism, class, and gender. This study proposes that "piecemeal" refinement was not an epiphenomenonal paradox. Rather, it was the norm in the eighteenth century and constitutive of social values in the long term.
New England, consumerism, identity, status, refinement, material culture
Objects, Texts, and the Widow Pratt
In the middle decades of the eighteenth century the patterns of daily life changed dramatically for Britons of all social stations and localities. What scholars call the Consumer Revolution brought mass production, global markets, and increased consumer choice, whereas what they call the Georgian Revolution propagated a transformative suite of social and aesthetic values.1 Broadly, new ways of being in the world and new uncertainties were [End Page 217] emerging. Evolving material practices bound people together in new ways, and negotiations of consumer possibilities were diverse and context-dependent. Urban trading centers, including Newport, Rhode Island, were bellwethers of social change in a burgeoning World of Goods.2
The material world of Elizabeth Pratt, a widow and trader in eighteenth-century Newport, was part of on-the-ground mechanisms through which individuals propagated complex and contingent early modern transformations, in particular those associated with social values and the material culture of daily life. Alongside the thousands of artifact fragments excavated from Pratt's house lot, there is an enriching documentary legacy of deeds, probate records, court files, and wholesaler accounts. Together these primary sources describe recurring events and key moments in her personal and professional life.
Recovered artifacts and discovered texts should be evaluated in tandem. They coalesce into a multidimensional (though inevitably partial) view of a historical subject. Without documentary evidence, for example, there is nothing to say that a portion of the Wanton-Lyman-Hazard (WLH) archaeology site was once occupied by a widow, or that her household at times included a daughter and a young enslaved woman. Material evidence alone does not prove that Pratt was a member of Newport's middling sorts, a female property owner who kept shop and struggled in multiple court sessions against kin and clients. Thus, documents contextualize artifacts from Pratt's house lot, framing them as elements of status and developing class identities; as collateral in a disputed world of goods; and as tutors and tools of a flexible new refinement.
Excavated artifacts have their own evidentiary strengths. They offer a physical connection with the past and compelling evidence of underdocumented practices and persons. They provide what Linda Young calls "the [End Page 218] personal context of consumption."3 Artifacts recovered at the WLH site prompt us to recollect Widow Pratt in the first place, to make sense of her experiences and contexts. Archaeologists recovered remnants of daily doings absent from any written documents. Routines of drinking, dining, health, hygiene, and consumer possibilities and preferences made up an active life and left material signatures. Artifacts from Pratt's home mark instances of selective choice that were guided by developing norms and limited possibilities. Knowing all this, in turn, shapes critical interpretations of Pratt's documentary legacy.
Close, interdisciplinary study of Pratt's possessions and decision making suggests that her consumer, dining, and trading choices were not wholly predictable on the basis of practices of her contemporaries in Newport. She did not emulate well-to-do neighbors, nor did she make the same choices as other middling property owners in the town.4 Yet Pratt participated in Newport's burgeoning consumerism in meaningful ways. By using material goods and social relationships to make her way in the world, she positioned herself in society and continually defined the boundaries of roles as mother, matriarch, entrepreneur, widow, and head of household. A genealogical or biographical study such as this one need not be trivial if it is situated within cultural frameworks, such as negotiation of the new World of Goods and relations of Georgian value systems.5 In this broader context, Pratt's choices speak to developing discourses of consumerism, class, and gender. [End Page 219]
This case study explores Elizabeth Pratt's world, the retail-scape of colonial Newport, and the use of everyday material culture to define or redefine social roles, relationships, and structures during a key period of early modern transformations.6 Notions of gentility, in flux during Pratt's life, are of special importance because of their long legacy and deep integration in American value systems. "Because the elites did it first" is a thin explanation for the coalescence and perpetuation of early modern practices and values. Top-down Marxist frameworks and emulative models of consumer choice do a poor job of engaging with nonelite practices in transition, in effect reducing the middling sorts to an epiphenomenal social grouping.7 The interdisciplinary perspective applied to the Pratt study focuses on acts of [End Page 220] calculation and choice from an emic, middling perspective. It draws from archaeology, history, ethnography, and social theory to foreground the materiality of daily life and the ways in which everyday practices not only reflect but also shape social relationships at multiple scales of time, place, and personhood. Through this study and Gallagher's (this volume), home and body are revealed as loci of self-fashioning and empowerment, as well as of contested gentility and dysfunction.
Life in the Pratt Household
The widow Elizabeth Pratt had established herself as a shopkeeper in Newport by the early 1720s.8 Newport was an ideal location for such an enterprise. Trade sustained the port town, and entrepreneurship was prevalent. Additionally, Newport's gender imbalance made women-run businesses and households relatively common. All sorts of women, elite to enslaved, undertook some form of retail. Before the Revolution, there was no discredit to a woman working in this way; it was even the fashion for the wives of well-to-do Newport merchants to tend shop and supervise clerks.9 Pratt's gendered identity as a widow and her status identity as a head-of-household and middling property owner were inherent in (and continuously defined through) her daily practices. It is on her home life as a head of household that this archaeological study focuses.
Understanding Pratt's wider world flows from an understanding of her socially derived identity, her roles as older woman, head of household, mother, property owner, person of English descent, and businessperson. Pratt sold dry goods: linen, cotton, wool, and silk fabrics and sewing supplies, as well as many foodstuffs and sundries such as sugar, chocolate, [End Page 221] paper, butter, coffee, and indigo.10 We perceive Pratt's negotiation of retail-based power relationships through court records relating to suits for debt described as "due by book" (debts recorded in the complainant's account book) (figure 1). She sold to (and sued) lower and upper sorts. For example, Pratt sued a mariner and his wife for debts accrued on fabric, sewing supplies, sugar, indigo, and chocolate, among other things.11
Elizabeth Pratt's signature on a 1733 court case heard at Newport Inferior Court. Collections of the Rhode Island Judicial Archives, photograph by the author.
The fact that the woman sewed clothing for Pratt, almost certainly for Pratt to sell, did not preclude the widow from seeking compensation. Pratt also sued a member of one of the wealthiest, best-known families in town when he failed to pay for stockings, a speckled shirt (probably for an employee [End Page 222] or slave), and a brocaded girdle (probably for a wife or other female relation).12
Court documents provide rich anecdotes, evoking the individuality and even the personality of Pratt and her contacts. These sources do little, however, to reveal the intimacies of daily life in Pratt's household. It is at the scale of the everyday—the practical, the cumulative, the repetitive—that new modes of being were tested and perpetuated.13
Experiences of Domestic Space
Documents inform us that, at least until 1739, Pratt sometimes "kept shop" in her home on Spring Street, in a neighborhood near the main road into town from the north (figure 2). The sum Pratt paid for the property in 1723 (one hundred pounds) suggests a small dwelling, but documents do little to clarify people's embodied experiences at the house. That is, how did material qualities of the place and the many things in it influence people's physical, sensual, and emotional experiences when they were there? Archaeological information provides more of these details than do documents alone.14
A dense trash midden constituted Pratt's west yard, a space adjacent to her front door through which any visitor had to pass, in which many exterior tasks would have been performed. Excavation indicates that the yard was unimproved. There were, however, fewer than expected finds of parasite remains. This fact suggests occupants took care to confine night soil within the rear yard to a greater degree than did other households in eighteenth-century Newport and elsewhere.15 There is no archaeological evidence that Pratt ordered nature for either fashionable landscaping or utilitarian gardening, which also distinguishes her from many of her contemporaries and neighbors.16 [End Page 223]
A Plan of the Town of Newport in Rhode Island, surveyed by Charles Blaskowitz, engraved and published by Willm. Faden, London, 1777. An arrow has been added to mark the location of Pratt's home. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, G3774.N4 1777.B5.
Archaeologists uncovered the home's roughly 24-by-16-foot foundation, comprising one 16-by-16-foot bay and one 16-by-8-foot bay and chimney stack base. These finds describe a space not only small but also outmoded at the time of Pratt's occupancy (figure 3). The house had only about 512 square livable feet of living space and one multipurpose room on each floor. There "front stage" and "back stage" spaces perhaps were divided by story but not by walls.17
Pratt, and before 1728 her unmarried daughter Mary and a young enslaved woman named Dinah, would have spent most of the time in the [End Page 224] downstairs room, where a large hearth, windows, and a door characterized the space.18
Section of the 1677 Thomas Fenner House, Cranston, Rhode Island, from Norman Isham's 1895 Early Rhode Island Houses: An Architectural and Historical Study (33). Pratt's house was probably a close match to this enclosed-end-chimney structure. Archaeological evidence of the stone foundations gives us the size of the main room and chimney bay. The Reverend Ezra Stiles's 1758 map of Newport (reproduced in the 1967 second edition of Downing and Scully's The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 34) tells us the structure was two stories high with one chimney.
Pratt probably kept utilitarian vessels, like the many redware and stoneware jugs, milk pans, and pots excavated from her lot, on the first floor. [End Page 225] That is where her household prepared and served meals. Certain decorative vessels of metal, earthenware, and stoneware may have been displayed on the mantel, as described in many contemporary Newport probate inventories and visitor accounts.19 A complete Staffordshire-type redware plate with trailed slip decoration and a piecrust edge was recovered from the latest fill in Pratt's privy. It has no wear and a rounded base, rendering it unsuitable for use at table. Perhaps this eye-catching yet traditional item decorated Pratt's downstairs room during her later years, replacing equally traditional blue and gray stoneware jugs and mugs that were discarded in the same privy several years earlier.
Daily tasks such as cooking, washing, eating, sleeping, socializing, and doing business were not spatially separated in Pratt's home even though multipurpose rooms were out of fashion by the time Pratt lived on her small house lot.20 All around her in Newport, houses had been built with two or four rooms per floor; they had distinct kitchens, halls, parlors, bedrooms, and storage chambers. In these square-plan and central-entry-plan houses, Pratt's multipurpose first-floor space would have been mapped onto several rooms. The segmentation, specialization, enclosure, and hierarchy associated with developing Georgian modes of architecture had no part in Pratt's domestic space or decor. Visitors and customers undoubtedly perceived many aspects of Pratt's life as she experienced them: in a single space, enmeshing what is today described as refined and utilitarian, personal and professional, public and private.
At Tables
Ceramics may be the most important data set for the historical archaeologist. Certainly, they are a major component of most domestic investigations [End Page 226] and speak quantitatively and qualitatively to choice, identity, and consumer capacity. There is no direct correlation between number and types of ceramic wares and the circumstances of site occupants. Rather, ceramics are a durable, common, nuanced, and responsive artifact of the culturally informed choices they, in turn, shaped.21
Developing Georgian practices of fashionable dining were not expressed clearly or confidently in Pratt's material surroundings. Her household did not discard any matching sets of tableware, nor did it purchase much white salt-glazed stoneware. This "neat and genteel" ware was perfected in the mid-1720s and was widely popular. It was available in a multiplicity of forms for dining, drinking, serving, and presenting foods and drinks, most notably as sets of decoratively molded plates, saucers, and serving vessels.22 The white salt-glazed stoneware goods Pratt purchased and discarded most often were drinking vessels, either mugs or specialized forms used for tea and other "new beverages." This term describes drinks—principally tea, coffee, chocolate, and punch—that were introduced during the British Empire's global colonial efforts in the seventeenth century and that required specialized vessels for their correct preparation and service.
In fact, the most prevalent refined ceramics recovered from Pratt's privy are the pots, cups, and saucers used to prepare and serve tea. The twenty-four distinct tea vessels originating within Pratt's home represent 20 percent of all ceramic vessels recovered from her privy and 40 percent of all beverage vessels from the privy. Of recovered vessels used for the new beverages, 67 percent were intended for tea. Additionally, of the sixteen teacups recovered from the Pratt privy, only three (19 percent) were white salt-glazed stoneware; eleven (69 percent) were porcelain; the remaining two teacups were tin-glazed earthenware (see cover image). At the time porcelain was the most expensive and refined ceramic choice available.
Historians discuss tea as a luxury in British American contexts until about 1750, when it is more accurately described as a necessity.23 Many could not [End Page 227] afford it or the specialized vessels and tools used to prepare it. Of those who could, some did not fully embrace or comprehend the idealized tea ceremony. There is no evidence of the ways in which Pratt used tea and tea wares. Archaeological and documentary sources, however, clearly expose tea as an important aspect of her life, one in which she invested. The Pratt kin group was buying and selling tea before 1733, perhaps two decades before its widespread social adoption.24 Most of the recovered tea wares from the Pratt privy were probably purchased and used during the 1730s and early 1740s, when tea's popularity was rising but its uncommon, refined associations remained strong.
Yet not all Newporters chose to invest in porcelain teacups, as Pratt did.25 Tea seems to have served an important, distinct role in her household. One can imagine how tea might have mediated interactions between Pratt and other individuals. The refined sociability of tea drinking would have been useful to Pratt not because it mimicked the customs of the rich and elite, but because it appropriated a feasible, suitable mechanism of sociability to her context. Tea drinking made sense, given Pratt's home and business life.
Embodied Identity
Cloths and clothes mediated social relations when they were displayed in a tradesperson's shop and "on his [or her] own person," the social body.26 Dress was a social cue, acting on a person and those that person encountered. It reified always unstable personal identities. Clothing also affected the physical and mental sense of self, providing sensations of warmth or coolness, comfort, ease, constriction, appropriateness, elegance, utility. Eighteenth-century people of all social stations were concerned with dress [End Page 228] and its manipulation, judging from period writings replete with sartorial anxieties.27 To understand Pratt's engagement with and transformation of refined clothing styles, we should explore her self-fashioning, unpacking choices and their significance. What is known of Pratt's habits of dressing?
In suits against Pratt for debt due by book, there are charges for silk and muslin handkerchiefs and for chores such as trimming cloth, mending stays and their covering, and making a trimmed silken riding hood.28 The hood in particular, along with a charge for horse hire, suggests that Pratt was a woman active in her community. If she rode the horse herself, she also possessed special equestrian skill. Even if the horse was for another purpose, Pratt clearly wished to present a particular appearance to the world. In this mode, she probably socialized and pursued business contacts. Riding was an iconic genteel activity in the colonial period and was not a part of most women's lives, especially those of nonelite urban women.29
By the late eighteenth century British and British American newspaper pieces about "thrifty farmers" who saw spousal requests for "calico gowns and stoneware teacups" escalate into demands for "silk and porcelain" were common.30 Horse riding was among many practices Benjamin Franklin critiqued as inappropriate for middling women; he viewed it as an extravagant [End Page 229] pursuit that would destabilize family finances and gendered domestic authority, to the ruin of individual finances and, by extension, wider society. This opinion was disseminated in his "Honest Tradesman" piece, reprinted by his brother James in the Rhode Island Gazette on January 25, 1733 (the year of Pratt's court case). Was it appropriate for Pratt to ride (either by herself or with assistance) or move through the community in silk clothing? There is no clear way to answer the question. The fact that she did hire a horse and obtain a silk riding hood suggests that she thought that it was. Like her other silken clothes, Pratt's trimmed hood was an important statement of taste, knowledge, and the power to realize personal ideals of self-fashioning.
The several artifacts of personal adornment recovered from Pratt's house lot further our understanding of daily taste through distinct interpretive techniques. These "small finds" (as archaeologists sometimes term them) are not numerous enough to support quantitative analyses of date, cost, or style (unlike the ceramics discussed above). Most artifacts of dress were found out of context and cannot be associated with a particular person or household. The beads, buckles, clothing fasteners, and jewelry fragments nevertheless resonate with Pratt's and her household's documented practices. These finds speak generally to the practical tastes of colonial non-elites.31
For example, a small colored glass knob, threaded on the reverse for screw mounting, was recovered from the mixed-period builder's trench fill around the foundation of Pratt's house (figure 4). Its opaque blue color mimics turquoise. It might have decorated the terminus of a fan pivot. Fancier eighteenth-century fans had such decorative screw-mounted rivet studs.32
This object is an interpretive entry point, a tangible reminder of processes at work in Pratt's wider world. A 1733 suit for debt proves that Pratt purchased at least one fan during her life.33
Fans became refined and fashionable accessories in the eighteenth century, icons both beautiful and useful.34 These strongly gendered objects were deployed in social encounters to mediate between a woman and those with whom she interacted. They controlled movement and regulated intimacy. [End Page 230] Fans facilitated mannered presentations of femininity. Although they were available in a variety of materials, they were costly and thus often worth repair rather than replacement. Yet, as Pratt's case study shows, fans were within the reach of nonelites (if a nonelite person chose to make the investment). This iconic accessory affiliated a nonelite bearer with feminine qualities once the territory of leisured upper-status women, while simultaneously appropriating and redefining these qualities for nonelites. For Pratt, her fan (if wielded skillfully) reinforced and gendered her authority as a shopkeeper and head of her household.
Opaque blue glass knob with threaded back, width about 1 cm. This decorative personal item was excavated from mixed soils around the foundation of Pratt's house. These soils were disturbed in the eighteenth century, probably during architectural renovation around midcentury.
Social Goods and Social Change
A central assertion of this essay—of archaeology as a discipline—is that material culture is not superficial, anecdotal, or illustrative; it is constitutive of social life. A material perspective, such as that presented here, goes beyond T. H. Breen's notion of a consumer "conversation."35 Things shaped [End Page 231] people's most internalized sense of how best to be in the early modern world in a practical, sensual, and at least partially unconscious process, one better conceived as practical than as linguistic. It is counterproductive to elide material considerations when examining daily lives in the past; things have always facilitated and shaped people's expectations, values, identities, and relationships.
Material culture certainly rearranged common practices during Elizabeth Pratt's lifetime, a period of global transformations. Some of the new materialities—tea drinking or dining on matched ceramics arranged on a tablecloth, wearing buckled shoes and hanging mirrors in one's house, using a clock to track the hours of a day and a ledger book to track the expenses of a shop—evolved from barely known refinements to integral necessities.36 Alongside these new customs, traditional things and actions gleaned new meaning in developing systems of value and interaction, especially in realms of consumerism and gentility. The truly new commodities of the eighteenth century (drinks, foods, textiles, technologies, medicines, plants, books, and so on) reformed bodies, spaces, time, health, ingestion, consumerism, gender, race, and class.37 This process was not monothetic, and outcomes were not inevitable.
This idea is not new, but it is newly embraced here. Carole Shammas concludes an authoritative study of preindustrial consumerism in England and America with a troubling realization: "The single most surprising aspect of the spread of new consumer commodities during the early modern period is that it occurred among a broad spectrum of people. . . . Paradoxically, the individual who drank tea in a teacup, wore a printed cotton gown, and put linen on the bed could be the same person who ingested too few calories to work all day and lived in a one-room house."38 Like Shammas, Nancy Cox describes these highly selective yearnings as "irrational," a disturbing paradox among nonelites, a disquieting problem to be explained away.39 Richard Bushman does the same when he systematically marginalizes nonelite consumption in his commanding study of the rise of refinement.40 [End Page 232]
In Newport, archaeological case studies at the Pratt household, as well as the Tate and Brown households (discussed by Gallagher in this volume), provide fine-grained confirmation that new practices were selectively adopted by the town's middling sorts. It is clear that even practices that became widely common were at one time embraced by different sorts of people in myriad ways. How does one make sense of this process in a holistic way? Even at the individual scale, how does one reconcile Pratt's small house with the high value of her shop stock; her financial struggles with her shopkeeping business; her vulnerability as a widow with her authority as a businesswoman; her parasitic maladies (explored by Gallagher, this volume) with her silk clothes? Contextual inquiry that embraces individual agency, creative choice, and multiple scales offers a path forward.
Cox cites a "complex and delicate relationship" between people's desire for novelty and for familiarity, the deep and dimly perceived pulls of orthodoxy and heterodoxy at the core of long-term culture change.41 The archaeological and biographical inquiry discussed here attends closely to these pulls, tracking early modern social change through and because of material culture.42 This study of Elizabeth Pratt has considered dressing the body; dining and drinking; and experiences of landscape and architecture as active engagements by an individual with a material world. Drawing from these material contexts, it proposes that "piecemeal" refinement was not an epiphenomenonal [End Page 233] "paradox." Rather, it was the norm in the eighteenth century and deeply constitutive of social values. More broadly, the findings suggest that scholars should look closely at nonelites to understand how and why certain aspects of the heterodox and novel became orthodox and established within American culture.43 This proposition is in line with ongoing research in Great Britain, which gives nonelite traders and consumers, specifically members of the middling social status groups, greater (and earlier) credit as agents of social change than either elite neighbors or gentrified leaders.44
Did Pratt and her eighteenth-century middling neighbors view their own practices as cohesive or disjunctive? This question has implications for the coalescence of middling and middle-class identities, and it is not yet resolved. The fact that eighteenth-century middling sorts enacted selective gentility suggests that selectivity itself was a quality perpetuated and valued in practical discourses across status groups. For example, the transfiguration of tea into a healthful necessity, and more broadly the "virtue in moderation" ethos of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century middle classes, may be traced to eighteenth-century patterns of choice.
Interdisciplinary considerations of sensual experiences (i.e., the body, material culture, and everything in between) are well suited to investigations of the early modern world. The genteel, refined, tasteful consumerism of the eighteenth century spread through embodied practices, along webs of intimate relationships, among people with specific interests, abilities, and concerns. In this light, the paradox of early modern consumerism dissolves. We are left with a need to investigate innovations and partial adoptions in their developmental contexts.45 This study reveals the intimate material experiences of one of Newport's middling sorts. In eighteenth-century urban centers like Newport, consumerism was a powerful opportunity for reconstructing personal and social identities, one that destabilized those identities and attendant social relations, perpetually in flux. [End Page 234]
Department of Archaeology, Boston University
Footnotes
1. T. H. Breen, "The Meaning of Things: Interpreting the Consumer Economy in the Eighteenth Century," in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993), 249-60; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Matthew H. Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996); Lorinda B. R. Goodwin, An Archaeology of Manners: The Polite World of the Merchant Elite of Colonial Massachusetts (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 1999).
2. Sheryllyne Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community 1760-1810: Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods (Boston: Brill, 2006); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behavior & Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1996); Carole Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer in England and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Phyllis Whitman Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World: Massachusetts Merchants, 1670-1780 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); see also Breen, "The Meaning of Things."
3. Linda Young, Middle Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 2. Young centralizes domestic material culture of the everyday, but she considers only curated objects and extant spaces. Young critiques her own data set as haphazard and biased toward the remarkable and socially dominant; yet she overlooks extensive archaeological literature that would substantively correct these biases (see esp. 2-3). Hunter, Purchasing Identity in the Atlantic World; Weatherill, Consumer Behavior & Material Culture (esp. 21-22); and Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised Society, ed. Christopher Breward (New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), esp. 7-9, all do the same. The latter two overtly lament the limitations of documentary data while ignoring alternative primary sources or secondary interpretations drawn from archaeological evidence. On their parts, archaeologists rue missed opportunities such as these because comprehension of early modern cultural transformations necessarily suffers.
4. Christina J. Hodge, "A Middling Gentility: Taste, Status, and Material Culture at the Eighteenth-Century Wood Lot, Wanton-Lyman-Hazard Site, Newport, Rhode Island" (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2007).
5. Gavin Lucas, "Historical Archaeology and Time," in Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 40-1.
6. Bushman, The Refinement of America.
7. See, for example, Weatherill, Consumer Behavior & Material Culture; Richards, Eighteenth-century Ceramics; Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Jonathan Barry, introduction to Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks, eds., The Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England, 1550-1800 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 1-27. These three studies effectively demonstrate this perspective through document-based studies of eighteenth-century English settings. Colin Campbell, "Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England: A Character-Actor Approach," in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993), 40-57, presents a strong sociological critique of emulation, which he finds in itself an unconvincing explanation for the trajectories of consumer culture seen in England and America. Archaeological case studies come to similar conclusions; see, for example, John Bedell, "Delaware Archaeology and the Revolutionary Eighteenth Century," Historical Archaeology 35, no. 4 (2001), 83-104; John Bedell et al., "The Ordinary and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Delaware Excavations at the Augustine Creek North and South Sites (7NC-G-144 and 7NC-G-145)," report, Delaware Department of Transportation no. 159 2001), on file with Delaware Department of Transportation; Adrian Praetzellis and Mary Praetzellis, "Mangling Symbols of Gentility in the Wild West: Case Studies in Interpretive Archaeology," American Anthropologist 103, no. 3 (2001), 645-54; Alison Bell, "Emulation and Empowerment: Material, Social, and Economic Dynamics in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Virginia," International Journal of Historical Archaeology 6, no. 4 (2002), 253-98; Paul R. Mullins, Race and Affluence: An Archaeology of African America and Consumer Culture (New York: Springer, 1999). They consider a variety of contexts (including the industrial and the emergence of "the middle class") and periods. Matthew Johnson, "The Tide Reversed: Prospects and Potentials for a Postcolonial Archaeology of Europe," in Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman, eds., Historical Archaeology (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 313-31, advocates "bottom-up" (local, particular, contextual, and socially inclusive) investigation of the emergence of heterogeneous modern world-views, fueled through global colonialism. All these studies are contra Bushman, The Refinement of America; Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer; Mark P. Leone, "Utopian Architecture," Cambridge Archaeological Journal 12, no. 1 (2002), 134-36.
8. Town of Newport, Deed: WilliamWood to Elizabeth Pratt, 1723 (Land Evidence, Newport Historical Society, no. 4); John Freebody, Sales Book 1724-1759, 1759 (Merchant Records, Newport Historical Society, no. 552); Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Pratt v. Easton, 1725 (Newport Superior Court, Rhode Island Judicial Archives, NB 22 F.46).
9. Sydney V. James, The Colonial Metamorphoses in Rhode Island: A Study of Institutions in Change, ed. Sheila Skemp and Bruce C. Daniels (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000); Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island, in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), and Ebb Tide in New England: Women, Seaports, and Social Change, 1630-1800 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998); see esp. Crane, A Dependent People, 51, 76, and Crane, Ebb Tide in New England, 102-5.
10. Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Pratt v. Darkins, 1729 (Newport Superior Court, Rhode Island Judicial Archives, NB [none] F [none]).
11. Ibid.
12. Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Pratt v. Easton, 1725.
13. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
14. Newport County, Pratt v. Morris, 1733 (Newport Inferior Court, Rhode Island Judicial Archives, folder 211); Newport County, Morris v. Pratt, 1733 (Newport Inferior Court, Rhode Island Judicial Archives, folder 75); Newport County, Pratt v. Morris, 1733; Town of Newport, Deed: Wood to Pratt, 1723.
15. Gallagher, this volume.
16. Stephen A. Mrozowski, The Archaeology of Class in Urban America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Antoinette F. Downing and Vincent J. Scully Jr., The Architectural Heritage of Newport, Rhode Island, 1640-1915, 2nd ed. (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1967); Crane, A Dependent People.
17. Weatherill, Consumer Behavior & Material Culture, 165.
18. Bill of Sale of a Negro Girl Eliza. Pratt to Caleb Church, 1728 (Vault A, box 43A Slaves, Newport Historical Society, folder 26); James N. Arnold, ed., Vital Records of Rhode Island 1636-1850; First Series; Births, Marriages, Deaths; A Family Register for the People (Providence: Narragansett Historical Publishing Co., 1898), 10:465; Myron O. Stachiw, The Early Architecture and Landscapes of the Narragansett Basin, vol. 1, Newport (N.p.: Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2001); Norman Morrison Isham, Early Rhode Island Houses: An Architectural and Historical Study (Providence: Preston & Rounds, 1895).
19. For example, Town of Newport, Probate Inventory of Sarah Rogers, March 1, 1731/32, 1732 Town Council 7 (1731-35), Newport Historical Society; Town of Newport, Probate Inventory of Ralph Chapman, March 3, 1728/29, 1729 Town Council 6 (1727-30), Newport Historical Society; Alexander Hamilton, The Itiner-arium of Dr. Alexander Hamilton, 1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948); see also Weatherill, Consumer Behavior & Material Culture, 140-41.
20. Weatherill, Consumer Behavior & Material Culture, 165; Stachiw, Newport; Downing and Scully, The Architectural Heritage of Newport. See Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism.
21. David Baker and Teresita Majewski, "Ceramic Studies in Historical Archaeology," in Hicks and Beaudry, The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology, 205-31.
22. Ann Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Back-country Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 19; see also Ann Smart Martin, "'Fashionable Sugar Dishes, Latest Fashion Ware': The Cream-ware Revolution in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake," in Paul A. Shackel and Barbara J. Little, eds., Historical Archaeology of the Chesapeake (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 169-87.
23. Rodris Roth, "Tea-drinking in Eighteenth-Century America: Its Etiquette and Equipage," in Robert Blair St. George, ed., Material Life in America, 1600-1860 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 439-62; Goodwin, An Archaeology of Manners, 124-27.
24. Newport County, Pratt v. Morris, 1733; Newport County, Morris v. Pratt, 1733; Newport County, Lawrence v. Morris, 1733 (Newport Inferior Court, Rhode Island Judicial Archives, folder 197); Newport County, Morris v. Lawrence, 1733 (Newport Inferior Court, Rhode Island Judicial Archives, folder 77).
25. Christina J. Hodge, "'Articles Too Tedious to Enumerate': The Appreciation of Ceramics in Mid-18th-Century Newport, Rhode Island," Northeast Historical Archaeology 35 (2006), 1-14; Mrozowski, The Archaeology of Class.
26. Nancy Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000), 138; see, for example, Diana DiPaolo Loren, "Social Skins: Orthodoxies and Practices of Dressing in the Early Colonial Lower Mississippi Valley," Journal of Social Archaeology 1, no. 2 (2001), 172-89; Barbara L. Voss, The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis: Race and Sexuality in Colonial San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
27. Primary sources that discuss nonelites' more or less appropriate clothing in American contexts include Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journal of Madam Knight (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Literature House, 1970); Hamilton, The Itinerarium; Benjamin Franklin, "I Am an Honest Tradesman" (1732), in Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1, January 6, 1706 through December 31, 1734, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959). For general consideration of this topic, see, for example, John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Patricia Crown, "Clothing the Modern Venus: Hogarth and Women's Dress," in Elise Goodman, ed., Art and Culture in the Eighteenth Century: New Dimensions and Multiple Perspectives (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001); Goodwin, An Archaeology of Manners; Carolyn L. White, American Artifacts of Personal Adornment, 1680-1820: A Guide to Identification and Interpretation (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2005); Cox, The Complete Tradesman.
28. Newport County, Lawrence v. Morris, 1733; Newport County, Morris v. Lawrence, 1733; Newport County, Morris v. Pratt, 1733; Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Darkins v. Pratt, 1729 (Newport Superior Court, Rhode Island Judicial Archives, NB [none] F [none]).
29. Newport County, Morris v. Pratt, 1733; Franklin, "I Am an Honest Tradesman."
30. Bushman, The Refinement of America, 203.
31. See Hodge, "A Middling Gentility," for a complete discussion of site finds. Small finds speak not only to the tastes of white individuals at the site, but also to the tastes of enslaved individuals such as Dinah, who worked, lived, and visited the place.
32. White, American Artifacts of Personal Adornment, 123.
33. Newport County, Morris v. Pratt, 1733.
34. White, American Artifacts of Personal Adornment, 123-25; see also Goodwin, An Archaeology of Manners, 99, 114-18.
35. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); see also Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice.
36. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution; Bushman, The Refinement of America; Goodwin, An Archaeology of Manners; Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics; Weatherill, Consumer Behavior & Material Culture.
37. Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 197.
38. Shammas, The Pre-industrial Consumer, 299.
39. Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 197.
40. Bushman, The Refinement of America. For a critical perspective on Bushman, see Robert Blair St. George's review of Bushman's volume in William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1993), 793-96.
41. Cox, The Complete Tradesman, 197; see Bourdieu, Distinction, for discussions of doxies, agency, social structure, and change.
42. In Native American contexts see, for example, Kent G. Lightfoot, Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff, "Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: An Archaeological Study of Culture Change and Persistence from Fort Ross, California," American Antiquity 63, no. 2 (1998), 199-222; Loren, "Social Skins." In African American contexts see, for example, Mullins, Race and Affluence; Praetzellis and Praetzellis, "Mangling Symbols of Gentility in the Wild West." In Chinese American contexts see, for example, Adrian Praetzellis, "The Archaeology of Ethnicity: An Example from Sacramento, California's Early Chinese District," in Geoff Egan and R. L. Michael, eds., Old and New Worlds (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1999), 127-35; Barbara L. Voss, "The Archaeology of Overseas Chinese Communities," World Archaeology 37, no. 3 (2005), 424-39. In relation to class see, for example, Diana diZerega Wall, "Constructing Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century Middle-Class New York," in James A. Delle, Stephen A. Mrozowski, and Robert Paynter, eds., Lines That Divide: Historical Archaeologies of Race, Class, and Gender (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2000), 109-41; Stephen A. Mrozowski, Grace H. Ziesing, and Mary C. Beaudry, Living on the Boott: Historical Archaeology at the Boott Mills Boardinghouses, Lowell, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
43. I side with the anti-Veblenesque camp of Campbell, "Understanding Traditional and Modern Patterns of Consumption"; Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics; Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community; and others.
44. Weatherill, Consumer Behavior & Material Culture; Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics; Haggerty, The British-Atlantic Trading Community. Gallagher in this volume also pushes understandings of the middling sorts further, refining our understanding of the mechanisms by which people positioned themselves within this social collective and the legacies of their experiences.
45. This finding agrees with Johnson, "The Tide Reversed," and in Old World British contexts, Johnson, An Archaology of Capitalism. The adoption of a Georgian worldview, and the early modern values it inculcated, was piecemeal and defined at multiple social sites, on both sides of the Atlantic and for its whole history.
