The Eighteenth Century

Long ago, on the far side of amountain, lived the King of Little Things.while other kings busied themselves with thebig things of this world, he happily ruled overall things small.

Bill Lepp, The King of Little Things¹

In Bill Lepp's children's book, the greedy King Normous finds his dreams of expanding his empire foiled by a revolt of all things small, by "lights unlit, scarves unknit." Chloe Wigston Smith and Beth Fowkes Tobin's collection of seventeen essays, Small Things in the Eighteenth Century: The Political and Personal Value of the Miniature (Cambridge, 2022), may have a very different audience and fewer rhymed couplets, but it too reminds readers "that small things are all too frequently overlooked" and we should recognize their power, or, in academic terms, we must "grapple with the contours of their intimate and political complexities" (1). As the introduction outlines, it is important to think not of small objects but of "small things." The collection asks that we move away from the passivity inherent in the subject/object binary and instead adopt Jane Bennett's and Bruno Latour's focus on the agency of "nonhuman subjects" or "things" (2). The essays describe how small things, from the ordinary and mundane to the domestic or luxurious, were products of a growing eighteenth-century European manufacturing culture and a fixture of daily life. These small things circulated among communities, connected the private and public, and were often "embedded in the trade routes of saltwater slavery and empire building." They were never mere objects and were always "entangled" with those who touched, handled, made, and owned them (6).

"Reading Small Things" is the first of four thematic sections. The essays in this section address the challenges in reading and interpreting books and possessions that were tiny or miniature in scale. For example, Abigail Williams's essay [End Page 371] examines the logic behind miniature devotional books, often produced at a scale that made something considered sacred unreadable, or, in short, the paradox of a book "that is essential yet almost impossible to use" (15). The irony of the popular eighteenth-century children's series Gigantick Histories (ca.1740s) clocking in at 63 mm high and 47 mm wide further emphasizes the evolving ideas of scale, legibility, and knowledge during the period.

The section "Small Things in Time and Space" corrals together essays showing how small things such as coins, teapots, or wampum belts "reach back to national histories, geological time, personal memories, and political negotiations" (7). In this section, Kate Williams examines the Staffordshire teapots produced in the late 1750s and 1760s and featuring a design meant to "mimic the patterns shapes, and colors found in crinoidal limestone" (98). Crinoids are fossilized sea lilies, a popularly recognized rock formation. A diminutive teapot with fossilized forms raised questions about deep time, vast temporal spans, and solidity and permanence. Crystal B. Lake makes a similar point with an examination of the reverence for old coins and medals, those small numismatic objects that were viewed as "vehicles for the memorable transference of history's most enduring lessons" (94).

In the section "Small Things at Hand," the authors look closely at not only the material construction of small things but also the way the user often personalized them. These essays argue that the "images, numbers, and words [on them] spoke of political conflict" (8). Pauline Rushton resurrects from the bottom of the curated decorative arts world the largely discounted men's leather letter cases or wallets. As a small personal possession, these cases carried bills and fit snugly in a greatcoat pocket, but personal markers and small design changes established the merchant's social status. Importantly, the Liverpool merchant wallets under examination were also a repository for the documents connecting merchant wealth to the violent transatlantic slave trade.

Letter cases moved along with their owners, and the mobility of miniature items unites the essays in "Small Things on the Move." By examining everything from ants, tea, and creamware jugs to fans and snuffboxes decorated with images of Britannia, these essays conclude that the movement of small things often served to destabilize or reinforce narratives of global and scientific significance. For instance, Romita Ray investigates the portable tea caddy, lined with lead and paper, as a product of global trade. She argues that these "small wooden boxes convey the need to condense vast geographies of production into portable forms of wealth and capital" (281). The very smallness of the caddy, its ability to move easily among social contexts and far-flung places, was essential to its appeal and established ideas about global connections.

The contributors work as curators, catalogers, and academics in disciplines such as art history, literature, and the decorative arts. This strength of workplace and disciplinary diversity means the collection addresses the challenges inherent in the way we encounter small things—meaning, what we see displayed in [End Page 372] a museum setting and what documentary evidence we unearth to interpret it. While each essay in the collection offers the reader insight into a different small thing, four essays stand out for their robust interpretative framework and novel ways of making the reader recognize the previously overlooked. Chloe Wigston Smith consults the Old Bailey court proceedings to illustrate how witnesses identified small, portable, and commonplace stolen items such as snuff boxes, coins, spoons, and watches by recalling small visible details. In turn, she connects these accounts to John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728); the play flips the script to show how Gay's criminals work hard to render the familiar unfamiliar, thus making small everyday things subject to recirculation and profit.

The portability of small things moves from center stage to center slide in Tita Chico's reading of Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665). The essay focuses on Hooke's frustration with the unruly ants that "squirm, move about, and run away" thus avoiding the scientific scrutiny of his microscope. Hooke quickly recommends reading the description of "uncontrollable ants" in Richard Ligon's A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657). Chico acknowledges that such an "allusion [is] hardly neutral or innocent" and uses it to explore connections between "early microscopical practice and saltwater slavery" (229, 235, 239).

Patricia A. Ferguson highlights the tactile attraction of many of the small things described and the hands involved in making them. At the Chelsea porcelain factory in the mid-eighteenth century, porcelain fob seals, crafted to attach to a watch chain and less than 2.5 cm in height, were mass-produced with the likely participation of children. These "trinkets" were often finely detailed and depicted the "obsessions of the elite British society: pets, hunting, music, theater, and romantic aspiration" (195). Because these fob seals were carried on the person, they were held and touched while they contributed to the owner's social ambitions. However, Ferguson examines a subset of seals featuring exoticized and enslaved persons, represented in a "diminutive nonthreatening scale" (198), that offered British consumers the ability to "touch and hold their nation's mastery … over the world" (203). While these "toys" suffered hard usage at the hands of consumers, they have also been dismantled or gone unnoticed by scholars because they are "generally unphotogenic and rarely published" (203).

While the authors emphasize the challenges of seeing and identifying the importance of small things, Cynthia Wall's essay asks what to do when there isn't a small thing. Hooke struggled to pin down his unruly ant, and Wall argues the reader faces a similar difficulty in pinning down who is speaking in Horace Walpole's gothic masterpiece, The Castle of Otranto (1765). The detail-oriented printer surprisingly omits quotation marks around his dialogue, and even his dashes, meant to distinguish voices, instead seem to "actually collapse them" (55). Wall dives down a rabbit hole to explore the history of quotation marks and typographical contexts, only to emerge to argue that Walpole uses syntax and punctuation to mirror the confusion, darkness, and claustrophobia of the [End Page 373] novel's gothic architecture. In this sense, the quotation marks are the smallest of small things; in fact, they aren't even there at all!

Essay collections are a feast for the reader to explore new perspectives and make unexpected connections, but they are also an exercise in frustration for a reviewer, as there is never enough room to acknowledge all the contributors. However, the seventeen essays gathered here collectively mount a persuasive overarching argument for thinking in terms of "things" rather than "objects," expanding our field of study to include the small and diminutive, for asking what was touched and handled and how, and, lastly, for considering the ways preservation, display, and curation intersect with literary and historical analysis. Small Things in the Eighteenth Century certainly proves King Normous wrong when he proclaims, "Everyone knows that little things exist only to serve big things."