By looking within the marital home, and examining the gendered meanings of objects and spaces, more insight can be gained about gender and domestic consumption. Were the gender roles within the home rigid? Or by looking at material culture is it possible to see more fluidity in the gendered dynamics of power between husband and wife?
Much of the discussion about gender and domestic objects has focused on the idea of
345 Ibid.
346 ULA, V.1.16, Hannah Mary Rathbone to William Rathbone V, 1812.
a gendered division of space within homes, for example the chapter ‘Subdividing Inside Spaces’, in McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge.347 Both public and private rooms have been assigned gendered meanings in accordance with the way they were used.348 This is a useful concept to employ in attempting to understand the significance of different objects around the home, both in public and in private arenas. By analysing the inventories for men’s homes it is possible to examine the influence of the men and their wives in this negotiation of the domestic space. As discussed in the introduction, these sources do have their limitations, but read carefully they can be used to explore the extent to which there was a clear demarcation of space between husband and wife, how far these divisions followed what were thought to have been the conventional separations of the sexes in this period, and to what extent certain objects that have been associated with masculinity and femininity were deployed to create these identities. Detailed inventories of Colworth and Southill were taken in 1816 after the deaths of Whitbread and Lee Antonie and substantial inventories also survive from the Scottish families.
This allows analysis of gendered spaces in practice through interior decoration.
During this period, historians have argued that domestic space became more defined in terms of use, in particular gendered public and private uses. This change occurred in the country houses of gentry and aristocracy. They included ‘the introduction of small rooms for withdrawal and solitude’, room names began to reflect their purposes more specifically and the uses of public rooms such as drawing and dining rooms became more standardised.349 The purposes, names and locations of
347 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 212-268.
348 Girouard, Life in the English Country House, 233. Flather, Gender and Space.
349 Vickery, “An Englishman’s Home is his Castle?,” 148.
rooms within the home continued to evolve throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century, bedrooms were increasingly located on the first floor instead of the ground floor. This allowed for easier access to the garden from the public rooms. Bedrooms and the attached dressing rooms became more private. The dressing rooms were usually furnished as sitting rooms, however they tended to be private rooms and guests were not usually received in them. The family apartments did continue to receive guests although no longer in the dressing room, rather in a room attached to the female bedroom called the woman’s ‘room’,
‘sitting room’ or ‘boudoir’. The male householder received guests in his study, dressing room and bedroom, which were often adjacent parts of his apartment.350 The public rooms such as the dining room, drawing room, library and breakfast room also had gendered uses. The drawing and dining rooms were particularly contrasted as dinner remained a formal event in the home. After dinner, women would withdraw to the drawing room and men would continue to drink in the dining room, creating the gendered separation of the rooms according to their functions.351 The library and breakfast rooms provided a sitting room environment by the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Breakfast parties were given here for mixed company and homosocial groups.352 This section of the chapter will look at how far it is possible to identify gendered spaces from the available evidence for the case study families, and the extent to which this allows us to see masculine taste.
By examining gendered spaces and the items on display in these areas in the context of ‘a sex in things’ it is possible to examine both how gendered power relations
350 Girouard, Life in the English Country House, 231.
351 Ibid., 232-4.
352 Ibid., 234, 239.
played out through the material culture of the home, and whether the gendered meanings of objects and spaces was more fluid in these cases than has been previously assumed by historians.353 Vickery argues that contemporaries took for granted that objects had particular gendered meanings in eighteenth-century households.354 As Vickery has recently pointed out, while certain kinds of furniture began to be labelled as male or female in sale catalogues in the eighteenth century, it took much longer for these associations to be used more widely in everyday life.355 She suggests that goods were understood as gendered more broadly. In particular there was a strong association between women and tea drinking paraphernalia and also ornamental china.356 While she acknowledges that men had an investment in china too (often showy, status china rather than mundane everyday purchases) this is not explored in detail.357 The final section of this chapter considers how far goods associated with men could be found in the elite homes in this study, and examines men's purchases of chinaware in detail.
The decoration of rooms associated with people of different sexes appear from the Colworth inventory to have been remarkably similar in style. The supposedly feminine Boudoir contains very similar furnishings to the supposedly masculine library, having a number of objects in common, including two elegant and handsome china cupboards glazed in satin wood, and two beautiful stands (with handsome china dishes).358 The Boudoir and the New Dining room also contained similar Dutch paintings.359 The
322 Vickery, “A sex in things?,” in Behind Closed Doors, 257-290.
323 Ibid.
355 Ibid., 279-287.
356 Ibid., 271-278.
357 Ibid., 278-279.
358 PRO, C114/176, Colworth Inventory, 1816.
359 Ibid.
Boudoir held objects one might associate with masculinity such as a gilt ornamental inkstand.360 The drawing room and library shared the same handsome blue and gilt chairs with cane seats.361 The drawing room, much like the pink study and library, contained valuable timepieces.362 This could suggest that in this case the general decoration of Colworth was not particularly gender driven. This is interesting in itself as it suggests that the influence of gender on interior decoration was flexible. Vickery suggests that ‘masculinity was allied with the discipline of formal grandeur, while rooms associated with femininity were allowed more informality in behaviour and thus more experiment in ornamentation.’363 However this does not seem to apply to either of the case studies examined here as the gendered spaces were relatively similar in style and ornamentation was present in spaces that were considered masculine domains.
There appears to be slightly more variation in Southill between the feminine and masculine public areas than at Colworth. The drawing room appears more decorative in style than the dining room. For instance, the drawing room contained a long list of china, including antique china, three rosewood pier tables with shelves for china on top decorated with brass moulding and two large Japan china jars on gilt plinths.364 The dining room lists a number of ‘oriental’ items, mahogany furniture and works of art but relatively few decorative objects. It could be argued that as the drawing room was more lavishly furnished than the dining room this reflected the
360 Ibid.
361 Ibid.
362 Ibid.
363 Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, 303.
364 BCRO.130, Southill Inventory, 1816.
feminine nature of the room and it was the more extravagant female taste that influenced its style. Overall, it does not appear that these two houses could be accurately described in terms of the gendered division of spaces and objects alone.
The evidence suggests there was more fluidity in the way these men interpreted the
‘sex of things’ than historians have sometimes suggested. The contents of the majority of the rooms analysed with either feminine or masculine purposes, appear to have mixed objects and styles with specific gendered meanings. This may suggest that objects which have been considered in terms of their gendered meanings may have held alternative cultural meanings compatible with the identities of these men. The Southill inventory of 1816 is more explicit in naming the private rooms than that of Colworth conducted in the same year, which means that we can directly link the use of rooms to male and female household members. It lists Whitbread’s sitting room, bedroom and dressing room and the same for Lady Whitbread. The decorative items on display in Whitbread’s sitting room were an interesting mixture of styles. An analysis of a room that belonged to him explicitly, which held public connotations, shows his taste and his use of material objects for outward display. Along with a large number of writing accoutrements, there was ‘An ancient earthen jug’ and ‘a small statue of Faunus in marble’. Coltman argues that classical objects such as these were
‘conceptualized as part of the furniture of the educated mind’. 365 Classical items appealed to the educated and elite man, who had been to Italy on the Grand Tour and had an education rooted in classical language and history. By the 1760s, the Grand Tour comprised an increasingly common itinerary, which emphasised an education in
365 Coltman, Classical Sculpture, 192.
antiquities and the cultivation of connoisseurship.366 The elite masculine ability to recognise and appreciate classic and antique objects acquired through a privileged education placed the commodification of antiquity within the territory of the ‘man of taste’.367 Producers such as Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton targeted masculine custom by aligning taste with connoisseurship, demonstrating that this was a significant factor in men’s attraction to such objects.368 The excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum created an interest among ceramic collectors to acquire genuine ancient wares.369 In 1767, Wedgwood designed a range in imitation of black basalt, linking with a contemporary interest in volcanoes and naturalism.370 The convention that classical designs epitomised the masculine consumer of sophisticated taste, whereas oriental patterns were considered feminine and unrefined, was contradicted in practice by elite patronage of both.371
Between 1760 and 1830 there were plenty of European manufacturers producing classically inspired ornamental ceramics. However, the Buccleuch inventories do not list any furnishings of this style. The ornamental ceramics owned
366 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997), 206-8.
367 Sarah Richards, Eighteenth-Century Ceramics: Products for a Civilised Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 204.
368 Jones, “The Fashion Manipulators,” 198-226.
369 Milo Keynes, “The Portland Vase: Sir William Hamilton, Josiah Wedgwood and the Darwins,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 52 (1998): 237-259.
Michael Vickers, “Value and Simplicity: Eighteenth Century Taste and the Study of Greek Vases,” Past and Present 116 (August 1987): 98-137.
370 Uwe Quilitzsch, Wedgwood, Klassizistische Keramik in den Gärten der Aufklärung (Hamburg: L&H Verlag, 1997), 14.
371 Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, 20.
by Buccleuch were Chinese and Japanese in origin and appear to be antique. They included blue-and-white china, colourful jars and bottles, Japanese dishes and blanc-de-chine figures.372 The duke’s Grand Tour, starting in 1764, did not conform to the classic route established in the 1760s. The duke spent the first eighteen months in Toulouse with his tutor Adam Smith. In 1765, they then travelled to Geneva for two months before moving to Paris for the rest of their trip.373 Buccleuch did not travel to Rome or Pompeii and was not encouraged to become a connoisseur of classical antiques. Rosemary Sweet argues that by the early-nineteenth century the British attitude to Italy had changed. Modernity and improvement in British cities meant they began to be associated with progress in contrast to Italy’s perception as old.374 Likewise, travel and British ceramics began to be more affordable reducing their appeal to aristocracy such as Buccleuch.375 Buccleuch’s lack of interest in the fashionable, classically-inspired ceramics, can be viewed in the context of changing fashions.
The Dalkeith inventories suggest that Buccleuch’s oriental-porcelain displays were not limited to smaller apartments and private spaces associated with women, as has often been suggested. The 1812 and 1819 inventories of Dalkeith House describe eighteen china jars on the mantelpiece and bookshelves in the library, a room heavily
372 NAS, GD224, Buccleuch Family and Estate Papers, 1745-1830.
373 Brian Bonnyman, “Agricultural Improvement in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Third Duke of Buccleuch, William Keir and the Buccleuch Estates, 1751-1812” (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 2004), 74.
374 Rosemary Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c. 1690-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 269.
375 Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour, 270-272.
associated with masculine space.376 The anteroom off the library contained six china basins and a white china beaker.377
The china ornaments were displayed alongside ornaments of a maritime and scientific genre. In 1812, the gallery contained an instrument for taking levels in a mahogany case, a painting of ‘Truth finding fortune at sea’ by Luea Giordano, and numerous shells.378 The library contained two model ship ornaments and shells on display with the china jars and ‘the duke’s culer room’ contained shells and ‘some other ornaments’.379 A number of barometers and thermometers were also on display around Bowhill.380 Historians have argued that masculine taste in ornamentation was focused around scientific instruments and maritime symbols. ‘Possession of these instruments reflected a man’s fantasy of himself, perhaps as a creature of questing intelligence or buccaneering freedom.’381 Such objects referred to enlightenment values, achievement, progress and national pride in Britain’s naval supremacy.
Buccleuch was a patriotic man who was actively involved in the military. He was also well educated and his book collection suggests a real interest in scientific and nautical themes. Titles include: The History of Shipbuilding, The History of Inventions and Trade and Navigation in Great Britain.382 The evidence suggests that the ornamental displays around Dalkeith House corresponded with the duke’s personal interests rather than popular fashion, marketing or status symbolism. The duke’s ornamentation and
376 NAS, GD224/962/21, Inventories of Dalkeith, 1812-1819.
377 Ibid.
378 NAS, GD224/962/21/1, Inventory of Dalkeith, 1812.
379 Ibid.
380 NAS, GD224/962/22, Inventory of Bowhill, 1819.
381 Vickery, Behind Closed Doors, 264.
382 NAS GD224/962/21/1, Inventory of Dalkeith, 1812.
the china jars integrated into the display represented Buccleuch’s identity and his
‘fantasy of himself’. The combination of maritime and scientific ornamentation and oriental porcelain in Dalkeith House suggests that masculine taste for exotic ceramics was integrated into these scientific and intellectual themes. They were incorporated into other tastes and styles of ornamentation, which historians accept, appealed to the masculine taste.
China was displayed throughout Dalkeith House in the halls, staircases and bedchambers. The ‘gilt room’, in 1819, contained nineteen china jars, four cases of eighty-eight china jars and ornaments; it also contained masculine items including three bookshelves, two writing desks and forty-six pictures.383 Thirty-one china vases were located in the gallery in 1819.384 These were described, in 1812, as blue-and-white china jars, coloured china beakers and bottles, blue-and-white china figures and lion figures.385 The gallery also contained masculine objects, including a writing desk and two satinwood-inlaid bookstands.386 Historians' assertions that oriental china was displayed in feminine spaces and had connotations of effeminacy are contradicted by evidence from the Buccleuch estate. Exotic ceramics were on display in Dalkeith House in masculine, feminine, public and private spaces.
Public spaces associated with masculine hospitality also contained large amounts of ornamental china. In 1812, the dining-room was described as having two and-white china jars on display, and the small dining-room contained four
383 NAS, GD224/962/21/2, Inventory of Dalkeith, 1819.
384 Ibid.
385 NAS, GD224/962/21/1, Inventory of Dalkeith, 1812.
386 Ibid.
and-white china jars and three white figure ornaments, possibly blanc-de-chine.387 As will be discussed in Chapter Three, the dining-room was the setting for important dinners at Dalkeith, for the social and business contacts of Buccleuch, including the literati of Enlightenment Scotland. It is interesting that Buccleuch chose to use stoneware dinner-services to entertain his guests and Chinese porcelain to display around the dining-room. Although Buccleuch’s use of plain dinnerware was linked to a desire to distance himself from aristocratic cultures of status-enhancing luxury, this does not imply that his use of oriental display porcelain was a straightforward contradiction. The motivations behind the duke’s taste are revealing when explored in more depth.
The eighteenth century was a time of radical change in the production of ceramics. The East India Company had a monopoly on the supply of Chinese porcelain to Britain until 1833. This meant that personal connection and patronage networks were vital in the trade. For men owning Chinese and Japanese porcelain in this period signalled a connection to this vibrant global trade network. Scottish men were heavily involved in the global-trade networks of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They made up a disproportionately large amount of professions on board East India Company (EIC) vessels.388 As the route into companies like the EIC was through other careers such as the military, law or accounting it was considered a respectable and gentlemanly career, even as the respectability of other trading careers declined.389 Therefore, many of the younger sons of gentry entered into this profession. The wealth and policies of
387 Ibid.
388 David Sanctuary Howard, Chinese Armorial Porcelain: Volume 2 (Chippenham:
Heirloom & Howard, 2003), 50.
389 Nenadic, Lairds and Luxury, 86.
Highland gentry ‘were closely tied to the lives, career-histories, and values that were generated by the non-landed careers of a wide network of male kin’.390 The use of a china punch-bowl therefore had symbolic connotations of the personal ties and networks many men had to trade with the East.
The personal dimension of masculine china consumption is reinforced through the organisation of the trade. The majority of china was imported through the private trade of the ships’ crew. The EIC allowed the crew a percentage of the ship’s tonnage for private purchases.391 This ensured they traded in high-value goods such as porcelain. Additionally the EIC stopped importing porcelain in the 1790s as taxes on it rose to 150 per cent.392 This meant the majority of Chinese porcelain imported into late-eighteenth-century Britain was through private Scottish traders whose, ‘business was as much with their friends and acquaintances as with trade establishments’.393
Buccleuch shows that he had an informed view of china and international trade.
The 1812 inventories of the duke’s books in Dalkeith and Langholm Lodge show a large collection of travel literature from places including China and South East Asia.394 Both properties contain four volumes of Chinese history as well as books about colonial policies such as Plans for British India. Whilst luxury objects from the
‘Orient’ were associated with excess and effeminacy, an Enlightened and educated
390 Ibid., 65.
391 Howard, Chinese Armorial Porcelain, 50.
392 Richard Kilburn, Chinese Porcelain, “The Study of Six Artefact Categories from the Wreck Site of the Earl of Abergavenny,”
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