Tyler
With looming deadlines and other school factors at work, it’s taken me a bit to gather my thoughts about these two chapters of At Home. Nicole adeptly discussed the (unfufilled) potential of Bryson’s commentary on style. My one interesting connection with these chapters is that I read them by candlelight (lighting being the focus of Bryson’s “Fuse Box” chapter) after the power went out one evening. I’m not sure how many people keep candles around anymore, but I had a few stashed in a tin cup and I dutifully lit them up. Bryson is right; reading by candlelight requires you to get right up next to the candle. You can read in dim light, of course, but within a foot or so of a single candle the pages are crisp and clear. But there is also comfort what might seem an inconvenience. The light is soft, and the pages glow, rather than reflect white light as they might with electricity. When the power snapped suddenly back on an hour later, part of me was disappointed. Perhaps the convenience of electricity has caused us to forget a more primal comfort with the colors and functions of fire. If I could encourage you to do one thing this week, it would be to turn off your lights and sit down with a book in front of the glow of a candle for an hour. There is no better way to understand the past than by experiencing it.
(Scroll down or click here to read Nicole's entry on the same section.)
Friday, March 25, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Material Culture Minute: "American Rustic"
Interesting article in The New York Times today about an aesthetic designers, collectors, and pickers are cobbling together using late nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century items: Not "the Victoriana that has been so popular in recent years," but "a simpler, more rustic and American-inflected style that is more general store than taxidermy-appointed lodge, and that emphasizes objects that are well-made, durable and useful: wire storage baskets, machine-age metal tools, leather couches, canvas bags, colorful woolen blankets and interiors made of barn wood." (think Ralph Lauren, as the article suggests)
My favorite part (or the part to which I relate most):
"When she leaves a flea market or antiques fair, she said, she puts whatever she has bought beside her, on the passenger’s seat, so she can look at it on the way home. 'My heart just starts to really beat,' she said. 'I wouldn’t make a dime in the antiques business. I’d want to keep everything.'"
Enjoy the tag sale season!
My favorite part (or the part to which I relate most):
"When she leaves a flea market or antiques fair, she said, she puts whatever she has bought beside her, on the passenger’s seat, so she can look at it on the way home. 'My heart just starts to really beat,' she said. 'I wouldn’t make a dime in the antiques business. I’d want to keep everything.'"
Enjoy the tag sale season!
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Reading Bill Bryson's At Home: Chapters 6-7, The Fuse Box and The Drawing Room
Nicole
“The Fuse Box” supplies readers with an overview of the history of lighting and heating. Bryson focuses on specific types of energy sources such as gas and individuals involved in developing new lighting and heating technologies such as Thomas Edison. Bryson describes Edison as “not a wholly attractive human being,” noting that Edison “stole” patents and manipulated the press (130). Perhaps this explains why my father, whose family is of Croatian descent, had grown up learning that Franjo Hanaman, a Croatian man, was the inventor of the light bulb (and not Edison). Either way, this discrepancy highlights the fact that technological advances are nuanced and attributable to many people, something that can be difficult to highlight in a book with such a broad interpretive framework.
But enough about the fuse box. At the start of the chapter on the drawing room (in many American contexts, this room became known as the parlor and later, the living room), Bryson summarizes the history of private life as “a history of getting comfortable slowly” (135). Despite this statement, Bryson does not discuss the history of comfort at length. Instead, after a foray into the history of professional architects and some elite building efforts gone wrong, Bryson presents a superficial summary of the cabinetmaking trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He cites the ever popular furniture design books issued by Thomas Chippendale (1718-1799), George Hepplewhite (1727?-1786), and Thomas Sheraton (1751-1806) as a means through which to comprehend the expanding professional class's relationship to the expanding market for household objects during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While these design sources were very influential and remain important touchstones in the field today, Bryson misses the opportunity to interpret design sources that would have been popular around the time that his home was built in 1851 and to explore how his house illuminates the narrative's larger themes.1
Bryson’s home, which was designed by Edward Tull of Aylsham, was inhabited by a member of the mid nineteenth-century professional class: a clergyman, Thomas John Gordon Marsham (13). We cannot be sure how the drawing room in this "cautiously Gothic" home was used, as this home seems to have included a drawing room as well as a more formal parlor for less intimate socializing (13).2 We also do not know how the home was decorated. Did its furnishings reflect its "cautiously Gothic" exterior? Without this information, we can use the year in which it was built--1851--as a jumping off point for thinking about what print culture (such as prescriptive literature addressing home decor or furniture design sources) or events (such as international exhibitions) may have influenced the ways in which the original owner or his contemporaries lived their private lives.
Based on a survey of extant printed sources at the Winterthur Library, the 1850s was a transitional period for domestic interior decoration print culture. Compared to the late nineteenth century, relatively few examples of European English-language prescriptive literature that specifically address home decoration were published in the 1850s. Therefore, we must look to publications conceived in the tradition of Chippendale et. al. that feature furniture designs.
What was the height of furniture fashion in the 1850s, and would we expect to find it in these furniture design books? Snodin and Styles note that mid nineteenth-century interior decoration trends and popular taste more generally can be characterized as the “battle of the styles”—or, an era in which consumers could select furnishings designed in any number of styles. After the 1851 Exhibition, they explain, the Gothic, or “design reform” more generally, exploded.3 Thus, when Bryson’s house was built in 1851, cutting edge design featured the “gothic revival” aesthetic, as represented by this table at the Victoria & Albert Museum.4
Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin designed this oak table, and John Webb manufactured it between 1852 and 1853. This table was designed for a house in Sussex. Victorian & Albert Museum, London, W.26-1972.
Despite the vogue for Gothic taste, many consumers resisted full-blown manifestations of Gothic aesthetics and continued to embrace rococo or baroque motifs rather than more restrained Gothic design motifs. (Marshman's "cautiously Gothic" home's exterior may represent this trend.) For example, P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction... (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853), features primarily rococo motifs and little suggestion that more streamlined aesthetics represented by the Gothic table above were coming into vogue. Thomson's furniture style itself might be considered conservative or mainstream; in addition, the format and content of Thomson’s book are also traditional, featuring brief explanatory essays on furniture construction and furniture function within rooms. As such, Thomson’s book is reminiscent of those issued by the likes of Chippendale and Sheraton.5 However limiting, immoral, or unattractive some consumers may have considered the style that pervades Thomson's designs, Thomson’s book gives us some idea as to the possibilities this aesthetic presented to home owners.6 According to Thomson, the "drawing-room...furniture and decorations afford full scope for the display of taste in the owner."7 This "taste" could manifest itself in a variety of ways. For example, sofas may have been plain or ornate:
“Drawing Room Sofas,” Detail, Plate LVIII (top), and “Drawing Room Sofas,” Detail, Plate LIX or Plate LX (bottom), P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction… (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853). (The Winterthur Library: Printed Books and Periodicals Collection.) Photos by author.
These were not the only options. Indeed, in the preface to his design book, Thomson notes how “comparatively easy it is to adapt [furniture designs] to the kind of work required” and goes on to explain that these designs “may, in fact, be multiplied indefinitely, by engrafting the decorations of one on the forms of another.” Although Thomson’s book does not feature any outright examples of the more up-and-coming Gothic taste, it does include some examples of design supposedly gleaned from “the Great Exhibition”—the Exhibition Bryson evokes at the beginning of the book—perhaps anticipating a move among some taste makers toward a less neo-rococo/neo-baroque aesthetic, or acknowledging the far-reaching influence of the Great Exhibition:
Note the that the motif at bottom right features the Great Exhibition year: 1851. “Details From The Great Exhibition,” Plate XCIX, P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction… (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853). (The Winterthur Library: Printed Books and Periodicals Collection.) Photos by author.
Thomson’s design book gives us some idea as to the range of fashionable (if not conservative) interior design possibilities available to consumers such as clergyman Marsham in the 1850s. Although we can't be sure what Marsham's "cautiously Gothic" home looks like, it probably represented a transitional era in architectural aesthetics and possibly home use when it was built. Similarly, Thomson's furniture design book represents transitional furniture design presentation strategies that were influenced by new ways to spread information about interior decoration such as international exhibitions.8
For all we know, Bryson’s home may have been furnished with the latest in Gothic design, Thomson's fussy rococo sofas, rickety secondhand relics---or all of the above. Much like we pick and choose decorating ideas from a variety of sources today, many of our mid-nineteenth-century predecessors did the same, combining the latest styles with well-loved family heirlooms.9 If we had a better idea as to how the home was furnished, we might be able to guess how the home (and the drawing room in particular) was used and what private life meant to Marsham. Furthermore, if we could compare Marsham's consumption habits to others in his town or to other clergymen, we might be able to draw larger conclusions about that region’s or that profession's relationship to national or international consumption or design trends. Despite the dearth of information on these points, at the very least, we can imagine that Marsham lived in an era that witnessed dynamic changes in the ways that people designed their private lives "at home" with their things.
(Tyler’s comments will be posted soon!)
Notes
1. The term design sources encompasses printed sources that contemporary scholars reference when interpreting material culture. Design sources can range from furniture maker’s design books to portfolios of well-known domestic or institution architecture to floral motifs used for executing needlework.
2. The etymology of terms such as drawing room and parlor are complex and vary slightly whether one is studying American as opposed to European interiors. The point here is that drawing rooms, parlors, etc., were both pubic and private spaces and were probably used slightly differently in every home, particularly in homes (such as Bryson's) that had more than one such space.
3. Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design & The Decorative Arts, Britain, 1500-1900 (New York: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 356-357.
4. Also pictured in Snodin and Styles, 350.
5. P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction… (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853).
6. According to Marlborough Rare Books, which currently has a copy of Thomson's book for sale, "Governor Sir William Denison replaced the original furniture of the Government House of Sidney in 1857 with more sophisticated 'modern' designs, which were based on Thomson’s book."
7. Thomosn, 36.
8. Katerine C. Grier notes that in an American context, the proliferation of parlors in public spaces such as hotels probably influenced the American trend toward creating "comfortable" parlors (or drawing rooms)prior to the influence of events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery (Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum; Amherst, Mass.: Distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press, c1988), 19.
9. In Kristen Wilson’s introduction to Livable Modernism, she uses her two grandmother's 1930s interior decorating as a means through which to explain how one era may have embraced a variety of styles. One of grandmothers had a traditional, “Colonial Revival” 1930s home interior, and her other grandmother had a “radically austere” modern 1930s home interior. Kristen Wilson, Livible Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 3.
Further Reading
For a recent exhibition featuring nineteenth-century watercolor interiors that present a range of nineteenth-century interiors, see Gail S. Davidson, House Proud: Nineteenth-Century Water Color Interiors from the Thaw Collection (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, c2008).
For more on the history of production, design, and consumption of objects in mid nineteenth-century Britain, see Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design & The Decorative Arts, Britain, 1500-1900 (New York: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2001).
For a recent interpretation of the design of the nineteenth-century domestic interior, see Stefan Muthesius The Poetic Home: Designing the 19th-Century Domestic Interior (New York: Thames & Hudson, c2009).
For more on the history of comfort in a domestic environment (particularly in an American context), which Bryson mentions in passing, see John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities & Design in Early Modern Britain & Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, c2001), and Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery (Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum; Amherst, Mass.: Distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press, c1988).
“The Fuse Box” supplies readers with an overview of the history of lighting and heating. Bryson focuses on specific types of energy sources such as gas and individuals involved in developing new lighting and heating technologies such as Thomas Edison. Bryson describes Edison as “not a wholly attractive human being,” noting that Edison “stole” patents and manipulated the press (130). Perhaps this explains why my father, whose family is of Croatian descent, had grown up learning that Franjo Hanaman, a Croatian man, was the inventor of the light bulb (and not Edison). Either way, this discrepancy highlights the fact that technological advances are nuanced and attributable to many people, something that can be difficult to highlight in a book with such a broad interpretive framework.
But enough about the fuse box. At the start of the chapter on the drawing room (in many American contexts, this room became known as the parlor and later, the living room), Bryson summarizes the history of private life as “a history of getting comfortable slowly” (135). Despite this statement, Bryson does not discuss the history of comfort at length. Instead, after a foray into the history of professional architects and some elite building efforts gone wrong, Bryson presents a superficial summary of the cabinetmaking trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He cites the ever popular furniture design books issued by Thomas Chippendale (1718-1799), George Hepplewhite (1727?-1786), and Thomas Sheraton (1751-1806) as a means through which to comprehend the expanding professional class's relationship to the expanding market for household objects during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While these design sources were very influential and remain important touchstones in the field today, Bryson misses the opportunity to interpret design sources that would have been popular around the time that his home was built in 1851 and to explore how his house illuminates the narrative's larger themes.1
Bryson’s home, which was designed by Edward Tull of Aylsham, was inhabited by a member of the mid nineteenth-century professional class: a clergyman, Thomas John Gordon Marsham (13). We cannot be sure how the drawing room in this "cautiously Gothic" home was used, as this home seems to have included a drawing room as well as a more formal parlor for less intimate socializing (13).2 We also do not know how the home was decorated. Did its furnishings reflect its "cautiously Gothic" exterior? Without this information, we can use the year in which it was built--1851--as a jumping off point for thinking about what print culture (such as prescriptive literature addressing home decor or furniture design sources) or events (such as international exhibitions) may have influenced the ways in which the original owner or his contemporaries lived their private lives.
Based on a survey of extant printed sources at the Winterthur Library, the 1850s was a transitional period for domestic interior decoration print culture. Compared to the late nineteenth century, relatively few examples of European English-language prescriptive literature that specifically address home decoration were published in the 1850s. Therefore, we must look to publications conceived in the tradition of Chippendale et. al. that feature furniture designs.
What was the height of furniture fashion in the 1850s, and would we expect to find it in these furniture design books? Snodin and Styles note that mid nineteenth-century interior decoration trends and popular taste more generally can be characterized as the “battle of the styles”—or, an era in which consumers could select furnishings designed in any number of styles. After the 1851 Exhibition, they explain, the Gothic, or “design reform” more generally, exploded.3 Thus, when Bryson’s house was built in 1851, cutting edge design featured the “gothic revival” aesthetic, as represented by this table at the Victoria & Albert Museum.4
Despite the vogue for Gothic taste, many consumers resisted full-blown manifestations of Gothic aesthetics and continued to embrace rococo or baroque motifs rather than more restrained Gothic design motifs. (Marshman's "cautiously Gothic" home's exterior may represent this trend.) For example, P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction... (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853), features primarily rococo motifs and little suggestion that more streamlined aesthetics represented by the Gothic table above were coming into vogue. Thomson's furniture style itself might be considered conservative or mainstream; in addition, the format and content of Thomson’s book are also traditional, featuring brief explanatory essays on furniture construction and furniture function within rooms. As such, Thomson’s book is reminiscent of those issued by the likes of Chippendale and Sheraton.5 However limiting, immoral, or unattractive some consumers may have considered the style that pervades Thomson's designs, Thomson’s book gives us some idea as to the possibilities this aesthetic presented to home owners.6 According to Thomson, the "drawing-room...furniture and decorations afford full scope for the display of taste in the owner."7 This "taste" could manifest itself in a variety of ways. For example, sofas may have been plain or ornate:
  |
These were not the only options. Indeed, in the preface to his design book, Thomson notes how “comparatively easy it is to adapt [furniture designs] to the kind of work required” and goes on to explain that these designs “may, in fact, be multiplied indefinitely, by engrafting the decorations of one on the forms of another.” Although Thomson’s book does not feature any outright examples of the more up-and-coming Gothic taste, it does include some examples of design supposedly gleaned from “the Great Exhibition”—the Exhibition Bryson evokes at the beginning of the book—perhaps anticipating a move among some taste makers toward a less neo-rococo/neo-baroque aesthetic, or acknowledging the far-reaching influence of the Great Exhibition:
Thomson’s design book gives us some idea as to the range of fashionable (if not conservative) interior design possibilities available to consumers such as clergyman Marsham in the 1850s. Although we can't be sure what Marsham's "cautiously Gothic" home looks like, it probably represented a transitional era in architectural aesthetics and possibly home use when it was built. Similarly, Thomson's furniture design book represents transitional furniture design presentation strategies that were influenced by new ways to spread information about interior decoration such as international exhibitions.8
For all we know, Bryson’s home may have been furnished with the latest in Gothic design, Thomson's fussy rococo sofas, rickety secondhand relics---or all of the above. Much like we pick and choose decorating ideas from a variety of sources today, many of our mid-nineteenth-century predecessors did the same, combining the latest styles with well-loved family heirlooms.9 If we had a better idea as to how the home was furnished, we might be able to guess how the home (and the drawing room in particular) was used and what private life meant to Marsham. Furthermore, if we could compare Marsham's consumption habits to others in his town or to other clergymen, we might be able to draw larger conclusions about that region’s or that profession's relationship to national or international consumption or design trends. Despite the dearth of information on these points, at the very least, we can imagine that Marsham lived in an era that witnessed dynamic changes in the ways that people designed their private lives "at home" with their things.
(Tyler’s comments will be posted soon!)
Notes
1. The term design sources encompasses printed sources that contemporary scholars reference when interpreting material culture. Design sources can range from furniture maker’s design books to portfolios of well-known domestic or institution architecture to floral motifs used for executing needlework.
2. The etymology of terms such as drawing room and parlor are complex and vary slightly whether one is studying American as opposed to European interiors. The point here is that drawing rooms, parlors, etc., were both pubic and private spaces and were probably used slightly differently in every home, particularly in homes (such as Bryson's) that had more than one such space.
3. Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design & The Decorative Arts, Britain, 1500-1900 (New York: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 356-357.
4. Also pictured in Snodin and Styles, 350.
5. P. Thomson’s The cabinet-maker's assistant: a series of original designs for modern furniture, with descriptions and details of construction… (Glasgow; New York: Blackie and Son, 1853).
6. According to Marlborough Rare Books, which currently has a copy of Thomson's book for sale, "Governor Sir William Denison replaced the original furniture of the Government House of Sidney in 1857 with more sophisticated 'modern' designs, which were based on Thomson’s book."
7. Thomosn, 36.
8. Katerine C. Grier notes that in an American context, the proliferation of parlors in public spaces such as hotels probably influenced the American trend toward creating "comfortable" parlors (or drawing rooms)prior to the influence of events such as the Great Exhibition of 1851. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery (Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum; Amherst, Mass.: Distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press, c1988), 19.
9. In Kristen Wilson’s introduction to Livable Modernism, she uses her two grandmother's 1930s interior decorating as a means through which to explain how one era may have embraced a variety of styles. One of grandmothers had a traditional, “Colonial Revival” 1930s home interior, and her other grandmother had a “radically austere” modern 1930s home interior. Kristen Wilson, Livible Modernism: Interior Decorating and Design During the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 3.
Further Reading
For a recent exhibition featuring nineteenth-century watercolor interiors that present a range of nineteenth-century interiors, see Gail S. Davidson, House Proud: Nineteenth-Century Water Color Interiors from the Thaw Collection (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, c2008).
For more on the history of production, design, and consumption of objects in mid nineteenth-century Britain, see Michael Snodin and John Styles, Design & The Decorative Arts, Britain, 1500-1900 (New York: Distributed by Harry N. Abrams, 2001).
For a recent interpretation of the design of the nineteenth-century domestic interior, see Stefan Muthesius The Poetic Home: Designing the 19th-Century Domestic Interior (New York: Thames & Hudson, c2009).
For more on the history of comfort in a domestic environment (particularly in an American context), which Bryson mentions in passing, see John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities & Design in Early Modern Britain & Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, c2001), and Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery (Rochester, N.Y.: Strong Museum; Amherst, Mass.: Distributed by the University of Massachusetts Press, c1988).
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Learning from My Own "Evocative Objects"
In the process of organizing my things when I moved into my current apartment last May, I experienced a moment in which life affirmed scholarship. After arranging one tableau of objects, I walked through my door a few times to make sure that visitors would be welcomed by a 1939 National Geographic map of New York City and its "environs" (pride in my New York roots), my circa 1790-1820 leather trunk (fantastic picking find lined on the interior with early c19 printed cotton I catalogued a few weeks before I bought the trunk; to be discussed in a subsequent post), a mid nineteenth-century chest adorned with fading red paint (another gift from Tyler), and the "mug for the office" (interest in the interpretative potential of antiquing finds and anything with a cryptic "relic" message) I wrote about for this blog's inaugural entry. As I arranged and rearranged, I stopped, sheepishly saying to Tyler, "Oh. People really did arrange their homes with self-presentation in mind."
I have added a few things to this arrangement since I first moved into the apartment: a paper collar box, an umbrella, and a Berlin work specimen.
As a scholar of material culture, this is a concept in which I strongly believe and on which my research relies, but sometimes it takes moments like these to reinforce the importance of (and perhaps refresh my belief in) the cultural meanings embedded in objects. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to think about my own stuff critically for a material culture historiography class I am taking as part of my Ph.D. coursework at the University of Delaware. After reading and discussing Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, a collection of essays edited by Sherry Turkle about what certain objects mean to individuals, I had to write my own "object biography" using an object of my choice. After rejecting the things that would tell far too personal stories, I settled on my glasses.
I knew my glasses were important to me. As I explain in the second paragraph of my essay, "Anyone who has carelessly plucked my glasses from a table, thereby threatening to smudge the lenses or frames with their oily fingers, or accidentally sat within a foot of them, has met my wrath." But I never took the time to consider what they meant to me until now. Are they a mere tool?
They are necessary for my professional life, but I can survive without them. As I explain in the essay, however, "by the time I was wearing my second pair [of glasses], they became a part of my sense of self." Why did my more recent quest to find the "right" pair last four months and involve a fine Philadelphia boutique, an online purveyor of vintage frames, and the local eyeglass chain store? After taking thirty minutes too long to find a greeting card on one recent trip to the mall, my mom said that the card didn't need to match my personal aesthetic. But, really, it did (I take pride in my stationary), and so do my glasses. They were selected not to stand out but to blend in, to represent me and to embody the things I value or find to be important about myself (brains, not beauty; quirkiness, not grace; quality, not mass production; me, not the other girl wearing glasses).
If only all my historical subjects left behind essays explaining what their things meant to them...but that would put me out of a job and take all the fun out of the research and interpretation. Essays such as those in Turkle's Evocative Objects, periodic realizations such as the once I cite at the beginning of this entry, and opportunities to reflect on my own stuff remind me that even the most anonymous object meant something to someone and therefore can tell us something important about our cultural and social history.
Although those explanatory essays, letters, and journal entries about "evocative objects" of the past are few and far between, they do crop up every now and then. Last January, Tyler and I stumbled into an antique shop in northern Delaware where I picked up a pack of letters featuring correspondence written by a Pennsylvania railroad man to his “dearest wife” during the late nineteenth-century. The topics he wrote about range from the circumstances under which he worked for the railroad; his experiences patronizing a boarding house; the difficulties he experienced using the mail service; and the his family’s financial and health hardships.
In one letter dated 6 August 1873, C. G. Cadwallader gives readers a glimpse into his world of evocative objects: "When I look around my room and see the different things the old clock ticked up with the key, the dog with its broken head, the faces behind the clock, and the paper holder and pictures suspended on the wall, they all seem to speak to me in a language of their own that calls to mind many many scenes...and looking around my room and over these there is always a something wanting and my mind flashes off to my dear wife and child. Ah, it isn't home without them." For Cadwallader, the things that populated his immediate surroundings represented the people (and perhaps a less itinerant lifestyle) he missed.
Are Cadwallader's letters fodder for the next sociocultural interpretation of late nineteenth century railroad work in Pennsylvania? For now, just like my exercise in apartment staging, they reminded me that objects always have and always will matter to people.
Further Reading,
Sherry Turkle, ed., Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c2007).
As a scholar of material culture, this is a concept in which I strongly believe and on which my research relies, but sometimes it takes moments like these to reinforce the importance of (and perhaps refresh my belief in) the cultural meanings embedded in objects. A few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to think about my own stuff critically for a material culture historiography class I am taking as part of my Ph.D. coursework at the University of Delaware. After reading and discussing Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, a collection of essays edited by Sherry Turkle about what certain objects mean to individuals, I had to write my own "object biography" using an object of my choice. After rejecting the things that would tell far too personal stories, I settled on my glasses.
I knew my glasses were important to me. As I explain in the second paragraph of my essay, "Anyone who has carelessly plucked my glasses from a table, thereby threatening to smudge the lenses or frames with their oily fingers, or accidentally sat within a foot of them, has met my wrath." But I never took the time to consider what they meant to me until now. Are they a mere tool?
They are necessary for my professional life, but I can survive without them. As I explain in the essay, however, "by the time I was wearing my second pair [of glasses], they became a part of my sense of self." Why did my more recent quest to find the "right" pair last four months and involve a fine Philadelphia boutique, an online purveyor of vintage frames, and the local eyeglass chain store? After taking thirty minutes too long to find a greeting card on one recent trip to the mall, my mom said that the card didn't need to match my personal aesthetic. But, really, it did (I take pride in my stationary), and so do my glasses. They were selected not to stand out but to blend in, to represent me and to embody the things I value or find to be important about myself (brains, not beauty; quirkiness, not grace; quality, not mass production; me, not the other girl wearing glasses).
If only all my historical subjects left behind essays explaining what their things meant to them...but that would put me out of a job and take all the fun out of the research and interpretation. Essays such as those in Turkle's Evocative Objects, periodic realizations such as the once I cite at the beginning of this entry, and opportunities to reflect on my own stuff remind me that even the most anonymous object meant something to someone and therefore can tell us something important about our cultural and social history.
Although those explanatory essays, letters, and journal entries about "evocative objects" of the past are few and far between, they do crop up every now and then. Last January, Tyler and I stumbled into an antique shop in northern Delaware where I picked up a pack of letters featuring correspondence written by a Pennsylvania railroad man to his “dearest wife” during the late nineteenth-century. The topics he wrote about range from the circumstances under which he worked for the railroad; his experiences patronizing a boarding house; the difficulties he experienced using the mail service; and the his family’s financial and health hardships.
In one letter dated 6 August 1873, C. G. Cadwallader gives readers a glimpse into his world of evocative objects: "When I look around my room and see the different things the old clock ticked up with the key, the dog with its broken head, the faces behind the clock, and the paper holder and pictures suspended on the wall, they all seem to speak to me in a language of their own that calls to mind many many scenes...and looking around my room and over these there is always a something wanting and my mind flashes off to my dear wife and child. Ah, it isn't home without them." For Cadwallader, the things that populated his immediate surroundings represented the people (and perhaps a less itinerant lifestyle) he missed.
Are Cadwallader's letters fodder for the next sociocultural interpretation of late nineteenth century railroad work in Pennsylvania? For now, just like my exercise in apartment staging, they reminded me that objects always have and always will matter to people.
Further Reading,
Sherry Turkle, ed., Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c2007).
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Material Culture Minute: A Gift
After coveting his brass trade ring, a few months ago, Tyler got the hint and had an octagonal brass ring inscribed with my initials made for me.
The ring was made by Mich Lige, a metalsmith. The ring is inspired by brass Jesuit trade rings that archaeologists uncovered at Michilimackinac ("the Great Turtle"), an eighteenth-century French and English trading post and fort on the upper tip of Michigan's lower peninsula. From about 1715-1781, the rings were probably used help convince the Native Americans to convert to Christianity, and they may have also been used for trading purposes.
Visit Mackinac State Historic Parks to learn more about this region and its history.
Further Reading
Judith Ann Hauser, Jesuit Rings from Form Michilimackinac and Other European Contact Sites (Mackinac State Historic Site: Mackinac Island, Michigan, 1982).
The ring was made by Mich Lige, a metalsmith. The ring is inspired by brass Jesuit trade rings that archaeologists uncovered at Michilimackinac ("the Great Turtle"), an eighteenth-century French and English trading post and fort on the upper tip of Michigan's lower peninsula. From about 1715-1781, the rings were probably used help convince the Native Americans to convert to Christianity, and they may have also been used for trading purposes.
Visit Mackinac State Historic Parks to learn more about this region and its history.
Further Reading
Judith Ann Hauser, Jesuit Rings from Form Michilimackinac and Other European Contact Sites (Mackinac State Historic Site: Mackinac Island, Michigan, 1982).
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