Small Things in the Eighteenth Century (Paperback)

Chloe Wigston Smith

ISBN 10: 1108995071 / ISBN 13: 9781108995078

Published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2025

About this Item

Paperback. 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. Featuring tiny books, buttons, ceramic trinkets, toothpick cases, handkerchiefs, mugs, tea caddies, coins and much more, this interdisciplinary book explores how people in the eighteenth century interacted with the small things they used, wore, played with, and displayed to signal their engagement with the larger world. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

Seller Inventory # 9781108995078

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Small Things in the Eighteenth Century (Paperback)
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1108995071
• ISBN 13: 9781108995078
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: new

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Authors

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).