Small Things in the Eighteenth Century

Chloe Wigston Smith is the author of Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2013) and co-editor, with Serena Dyer, of Material Literacy in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Nation of Makers (2020). Her current research, supported by a British Academy fellowship, centers on material culture and the Atlantic world. Beth Fowkes Tobin, a recipient of NEH and NSF fellowships, is the author of The Duchess's Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook's Voyages (2014), Colonizing Nature: The Tropics in British Arts and Letters, 1760–1830 (2005), and Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (1999).

Placing the minuscule under the magnifying glass, Small Things in the Eighteenth Century is an astonishingly diverse but uniformly fascinating collection of essays. From teapots, coins, and trinkets to insects, books, and beads, small things can be easy to ignore or forget. And yet in this volume small things are shown to spark big ideas, to move unnoticed through space and time, to traverse seemingly impermeable social and political boundaries. This book is a key intervention in the field and will demand the attention of literary scholars, art and design historians, curators, and anybody interested in gaining a richer sense of everyday life during the eighteenth century. Joseph Hone, Newcastle University

• 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.