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Daily Lives and Daily Routines in the Long Eighteenth Century
This book explores the ways in which the lives and routines of a wide range of people across different parts of Europe and the wider world were structured and played out through everyday practices. It focuses on the detail of individual lives and how these were shaped by spaces and places, by movement and material culture—both the buildings they occupied and the objects they used in their everyday lives. Drawing on original research by a range of established and emerging scholars, each chapter peers into the lives of people from various social groups as they went about their daily lives, from citizens on the streets to aristocrats at home in their country houses, and from the urban elite at leisure to seamen on board ships bound for the East Indies. For all these people, daily routines were important in structuring their lives, giving them a rhythm that was knowable and meaningful in its temporal regularity, be that daily, weekly, or seasonal. So too were their everyday encounters and relationships with other people, within and beyond the home; these shaped their practices, movements, and identities and thus served to mould society in a broader sense. Gudrun Andersson is Associate Professor of History at Uppsala University. Her research interests include early modern gender history, cultural history, and material culture. She has published extensively on early modern elite status and consumption, e.g. Stadens dignitärer. Den lokala elitens status- och maktmaifestation i Arboga 1650–1770 (2009). Jon Stobart is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research centres on retailing and consumption in the long eighteenth century. Recent publications include Consumption and the Country House (2016), the Routledge Companion to the History of Retailing (2019), and Comforts of Home in Western Europe (2020).
Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies Series Editors: Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton
The long eighteenth century sits as a pivotal point between the early-modern and modern worlds. By actively encouraging an international focus for the series over all, both in terms of wide-ranging geographical topics and authorial locations, the series aims to feature cutting-edge research from established and recent scholars, and capitalize on the breadth of themes and topics that new approaches to research in the period reveal. This series provides a forum for recent and established historians to present new research and explore fresh approaches to culture and society in the long eighteenth century. As a crucial period of transition, the period saw developments that shaped perceptions of the place of the individual and the collective in the construction of the modern world. Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies is a series that is globally ambitious in scope and broad in its desire to publish cutting-edge research that takes an innovative, multi-vocal and increasingly holistic approach to the period. The series will be particularly sensitive to questions of gender and class, but aims to embrace and explore a variety of fresh approaches and methodologies. Political Economy and Imperial Governance in Eighteenth-Century Britain Heather Welland Sartorial Practices and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century Sweden Fashioning Difference Mikael Alm Daily Lives and Daily Routines in the Long Eighteenth Century Edited by Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart Comfort in the Eighteenth-Century Country House Jon Stobart For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge. com/Routledge-Studies-in-Eighteenth-Century-Cultures-and-Societies/ book-series/RSECCS
Daily Lives and Daily Routines in the Long Eighteenth Century Edited by Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart
First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-32257-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-05259-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-31758-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVanatge, LLC
Contents
List of Figuresvii List of Tablesix List of Contributorsx
Introduction: Daily Lives and Daily Routines in the (Very) Long Eighteenth Century
1
GUDRUN ANDERSSON AND JON STOBART
PART I
Domestic Routines17 1 Lifestyles and Lifespans: Domestic Material Culture and the Temporalities of Daily Life in Seventeenth-Century England
19
TARA HAMLING AND CATHERINE RICHARDSON
2 ‘A Little Paradise’: The Urban and Rural Homes of a Manchester Manufacturer
41
THOMAS MCGRATH
3 Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines of the Eighteenth-Century Swedish Elite: Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s Diaries
62
JOHANNA ILMAKUNNAS
4 The Rhythms and Routines of the English Country-House Garden HELEN BROWN AND JON STOBART
82
vi Contents PART II
Public Space103 5 From Microhistory to Patterns of Urban Mobility: The Rhythm of Gendered Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam
105
BOB PIERIK
6 Space, Sociability and Daily Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Finnish Polite Society
125
TOPI ARTUKKA
7 Kaleidoscopic Spaces: Slices of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century Edo
144
BÉBIO AMARO
PART III
Home and Away167 8 Around and About: The Daily Routines of a Councilman in Early Nineteenth-Century Sweden
169
GUDRUN ANDERSSON
9 Daily Lives Dislocated? Routine and Revolution in Britain’s North American Colonies
190
EMMA HART
10 Everyday Life on the High Seas: Routines, Restrictions and Recreation on East Indiamen
210
LISA HELLMAN
Conclusion
232
GUDRUN ANDERSSON AND JON STOBART
Bibliography237 Index255
Figures
1.1 Carved oak chest, with a scene of Adam and Eve and an inscription commemorating the marriage of Izaak Walton and Rachel Floud in 1626 (now at Warwick Castle).32 1.2 Cast-iron fireback, with initials IPA and the date 1660. 34 1.3 Tin-glazed earthenware dish, with scene of Adam and Eve, initials TTM, and the date 1635. 36 2.1 A plan of the ground floor of 35 King Street as it appeared in July 1826. 44 2.2 Quarry Bank House and mill as viewed from the gardens.50 3.1 Skenäs. Lithograph by F. Richard, early 1800s. From Herrgårdar uti Södermanland (1869). 74 4.1 Turnover of gardeners, undergardeners and key suppliers at Arbury Hall, 1747–96. 86 4.2 Seeds and plants supplied to Stoneleigh Abbey by S. Harris, 1737–38 (cost and number of items per month).90 4.3 Fruit despatched from Stoneleigh Abbey to Grove House, 1794–97 (cumulative monthly totals, averaged over four years). 92 4.4 Monthly payments to labourers at Belsay Hall March 1809–September 1811.93 5.1 Digital reconstruction of the street network of Amsterdam in 1724, with public clocks and their earliest known year. 108 5.2 Average distance in meters between residence and event locations by timeslot and gender from depositions from Salomon de Fremeri’s 1742 and Cornelis Staal’s 1750 depositions (n = 1,057). 110 5.3 Number of observations by gender and timeslot from depositions from Salomon de Fremeri’s 1742 and Cornelis Staal’s 1750 depositions (n = 1,057). 111
viii Figures 5.4 Amsterdam’s sixty civic militia districts. 117 5.5 Average distance of between residence and event locations by time of day and gender from the depositions of Salomon de Fremeri (1742) and Cornelis Staal (1750). 118 6.1 Turku Assembly House floor plans from company’s Fire Policy Insurance 1816. 130 7.1 Schematic map of Edo circa 1850–80. 148 7.2 The fish market around the Nihonbashi Bridge. Woodblock print Nihon-bashi uoichi han’ei no zu by Kuniyoshi, late Edo period. 151 7.3 A street in the daimyō residential district of Kasumigaseki. Woodblock print Edo meisho Kasumigaseki by Hiroshige, late Edo period. 153 7.4 Street within the Kaminari Gate in Asakusa: photograph, 1911. 155 7.5 Shinagawa at sunrise. Woodblock print Tokaido gojusantsugi Shinagawa hinode by Hiroshige, late Edo period. 157 7.6 Ryōgoku Bridge during the summer fireworks festival at night. Woodblock print Santo suzumi no zu Toto Ryogoku-bashi natsugeshiki by Gountei Sadahide, 1859. 162 8.1 The diary of Kihlberg, the end of March and the beginning of April 1808. 170 8.2 Map of lake Mälaren 1717. Lantmäteriets historiska kartarkiv.172 8.3 Kihlberg’s routes to Stockholm: (a) January, (b) March, (c) September and (d) December 1808. 174 8.4 Map of Arboga c. 1800. Main square is indicated by c, town hall by d. Lantmäteriets historiska kartarkiv. 181 9.1 A plan of the improved part of the city surveyed and laid down by the late Nicholas Scull (Philadelphia, 1762). 192 10.1 The Swedish East Indiaman ‘Finland’, on which Captain Ekeberg sailed. 212 10.2 The menu of the Swedish East India Company in 1766. 213 10.3 The crossing of the line was a festive ritual. 216 10.4 Sketches of the birds and coastlines helped mariners to navigate. 217 10.5 Ships of many nations would gather at the anchorage of Whampoa, here in 1770. 222
Tables
1.1 Sir Thomas Puckering’s domestic expenditure, 1620. 1.2 John Hayne’s domestic purchases, 1634–40 (number of purchases and total spent).
23 27
Contributors
Bébio Amaro is a doctor of engineering from the University of Tokyo, specialising in the architectural, urban, and territorial history of cities in East Asia and Europe. He is a past recipient of the Research Fellowship for Young Scientists attributed by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and is currently working in Tianjin University’s School of Architecture as an assistant professor, as well as serving as an assistant director at its International Research Centre for Chinese Cultural Heritage Conservation. He is also contributing to the NWOfunded project ‘Freedom of the Streets. Gender and Urban Space in Europe and Asia (1600–1850)’ as an affiliated researcher. Gudrun Andersson is Associate Professor at the Department of History at Uppsala University. Her research interests include gender history, cultural history, and material culture in the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early nineteenth-century Sweden. She has published extensively on early modern elite status and consumption (e.g. Stadens dignitärer. Den lokala elitens status- och maktmaifestation i Arboga 1650–1770, 2009) and is currently working on diaries by the middling sort and on fashion magazines and the formation of the bourgeoisie. Topi Artukka has recently received his PhD from the University of Turku. He is interested in early modern urban social history, sociability, elite’s cultural history, and history of students. His dissertation focuses on Finnish urban polite society in early nineteenth-century Turku (Åbo), partly within the project ‘Over the Sea—Cultural Interaction Between the University Towns Turku and Uppsala, 1640–1828’. Helen Brown is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her thesis focuses on the production and consumption of country house gardens from 1750–1850. By exploring how gardens were funded, built, and maintained and how spaces were used by various audiences, this research seeks to emphasise elements of a garden’s history beyond its aesthetic properties.
Contributors xi Tara Hamling is Reader in Early Modern Studies in the history department at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on the visual arts and material culture of early modern Britain, especially in a domestic context. She is author of Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (Yale University Press, 2010) and (with Catherine Richardson) A Day at Home in Early Modern England: material culture and domestic life 1500–1700 (Yale, 2017). With Richardson, she has edited Everyday Objects; medieval and early modern material culture and its meanings (Ashgate, 2010) and The Routledge Handbook to Material Culture on Early Modern Europe (with David Gaimster, 2016). They are currently running an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project on ‘The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort’: https://research.kent.ac.uk/ middling-culture/ Emma Hart is a historian of eighteenth-century North America and the Atlantic world, recently appointed as Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of many articles on the region’s urban history, spatial history, and economic history. She has authored two books, Building Charleston: Town and Society in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (2010) and Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplaces and the Foundations of American Capitalism (2019). Lisa Hellman is leader for the research group ‘Coerced Circulation of Knowledge’ at University of Bonn and a Profutura fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. With a PhD from Stockholm University, she has formerly worked at Freie Universität Berlin, Uppsala University, and University of Tokyo, where she wrote the book This house is not a home: European everyday life in Canton and Macao 1730–1830 (Brill 2018). She works in the intersection among social, cultural, maritime, and global history in East and Central Asia, with a special focus on gender. Johanna Ilmakunnas is Professor of Nordic History at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. Her research interests span from cultural history of work, lifestyle, material culture, and microhistory to family and gender in eighteenth-century Europe, especially in Sweden. She has published the collections A Taste for Luxury in Early Modern Europe: Display, Acquisition and Boundaries (co-edited with Jon Stobart, 2017) and Early Professional Women in Northern Europe, c. 1650–1850 (co-edited with Marjatta Rahikainen and Kirsi VainioKorhonen, 2017). Topics of recent publications include thermal, material, and mental comfort in Swedish country houses, spatial order of an aristocratic townhouse in Stockholm, women’s work in manor
xii Contributors houses, diary-writing practices of eighteenth-century nobility, and material and emotional culture of death in eighteenth-century Sweden and Finland. Thomas McGrath is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University. His thesis, ‘Northern Powerhouses: The Homes of the Industrial Elite, c.1780–1880’, examines the domestic lives of merchants and manufacturers in Manchester and Liverpool in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His work focuses specifically on the changing physicality of the home and the impact of this on material culture and daily routines. His general research interests also include cultural practices and consumption habits in the twentieth-century home. Bob Pierik is a PhD candidate at the University of Amsterdam. He is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to early modern urban history, gender history, and issues in political economy. He is currently working on a dissertation on gendered street use in early modern Amsterdam for the Dutch Research Council (NWO) project ‘Freedom of the Streets. Gender and Urban Space in Europe and Asia (1600–1850)’. Catherine Richardson is Professor of Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent. She studies the history and representation of early modern material culture, writing articles and monographs about the early modern stage, clothing, domestic life, and household stuff. With Tara Hamling, she has written A Day at Home in Early Modern England, The Materiality of Domestic Life, 1500–1700 for Yale (2016) and edited Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture and its Meanings (Ashgate, 2010) and The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe (2016, with David Gaimster, Hunterian). She is currently running an AHRC project on ‘The Cultural Lives of the Middling Sort’: https://research.kent.ac.uk/ middling-culture/ Jon Stobart is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University. His research interests range across the practices, spaces, and materiality of consumption, particularly in eighteenth-century England. His current work focuses on the country house as a site and nexus of consumption and as a place of material and emotional well-being. His publications include Consumption and the Country House (Oxford University Press, 2016—with Mark Rothery) and the edited collection The Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700–1900 (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is currently working on a book entitled Comfort in the Eighteenth-Century Country House, to be published by Routledge.
Introduction Daily Lives and Daily Routines in the (Very) Long Eighteenth Century Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart
On the evening of 15 November 1781, the 41-year-old Parson Woodforde sat down to write about the events of the day in his diary—as he had done for the previous twenty years and would continue to do for the following twenty. The day was uneventful, yet full of activity. It started with breakfast at the King’s Head in Norwich, after which Woodforde went into town, visiting several shops—as was his wont. He went to Baker’s and purchased smelling salts, a comb and a ‘silent Top’, then to Mr Beatniffe’s where he bought a lady’s pocket book for 1782, on to Mr Toll’s for a pair of cotton stockings for his niece, and at around 11.00 a.m. to Mr Hall, an acquaintance with whom he walked to Mr Landy’s shop in the marketplace, where he made further purchases. He noted that Mr Landy was of Winchester and his Mother whom I knew well . . . kept a Huckster’s Shop there, and she had many a shilling of me. Mr Landy is married and came from London to Norwich about 3 years ago. He has a very good shop and house. I did not see his wife. Woodforde then returned to the King’s Head, paid his bill and then travelled home to his parsonage in the village of Weston. Arriving there about 3.00 p.m., he dined, supped and slept, being ‘rather tired and fatigued by being out’. He closed with the rather surprising note that his servant, William, ‘informed me to-night of his being ill in the venereal way’.1 As with many diarists, Woodforde was concerned with the here and how: he recorded his daily routine of eating, sleeping, shopping and visiting; noted the name of those he encountered through the day and even found space for things that did not happen (‘I asked Hall to take a ride with me and dine at Weston but he begged to be excused’)2. He was concerned with time and place, both in terms of the time-geography of his daily activities and a broader context of remembering earlier times and other places. As Ronald Blythe writes of Woodforde in his introduction to a 1999 edition of the diaries, ‘he has a reverence for small events and the domestic odds and ends of existence’.3 This book shares the same
2 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart concerns, digging deep into the daily lives of people in Europe and North America, often during times of momentous change, in order to provide a better understanding of their concerns, motivations and actions—but also to highlight their agency and that of their daily routines. Interest in the everyday and the mundane has grown considerably in recent years but has a much older pedigree. Originally written in 1701, Richard Gough’s History of Myddle forms a remarkable record of the entangled everyday lives in an English village during the late seventeenth century.4 It was first published in 1834, but it was not until the 1970s that this kind of descriptive approach rose to prominence, inspired in part by Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou—a pioneering work in the French Annales School that championed history from below, giving voice to ordinary people.5 Over its 600 pages, Montaillou narrates the daily lives but also the beliefs of villagers caught up in the inquisition into the spread of Catharism in the region. It formed part of a broader shift in approach fostered by French and Italian historians of workingclass movements who shifted their attention from the political organisation of workers and onto their daily lives.6 In British historiography, such micro-historical approaches have been most common in rural settings. Historians from Keith Wrightson to Steve Hindle have adopted this perspective, arguing that everyday routines were the most important aspect of people’s lives. Things that happened every day both shaped their world and their ability to shape the world. Turning this around, studying daily life provides us with the best window into the ‘real’ lives of people.7 Court records are often key sources for such studies, an importance reinforced by the digitisation of the Old Bailey records but also apparent in other parts of Europe. In Sweden, for instance, the 1990s saw a move away from looking at formal institutions, such as the state and the law, and towards court records as a source that can reveal more about the actions and thoughts of ordinary people.8 In the German historiography, meanwhile, the Alltagsgeschichte (everyday story) approach played an important role in showing the economic complexity of proto-industrial society.9 What makes such micro-histories more than a mere assemblage of stories and case studies is that the reduced scale of analysis brings with it a different methodological and epistemological approach. On one level, this allows the small scale to ‘reveal factors previously unobserved’, identifying relationships and processes that cannot be made on a large scale.10 The key approach here is ‘thick description’ in which the mundane and ordinary takes on greater significance in revealing deeper truths and broader structures in people’s lives. More importantly, through a better understanding of the small-scale and everyday, micro-history is able to throw new light on broader processes, not least through its emphasis on human agency, especially in Italian microstoria, and on the ability of ordinary individual people to affect historical change.11 Taking this as our
Introduction 3 starting point, we want to highlight three key ways in which the microhistorical approach links to people’s daily routines.
Routines and Identity: Status, Gender and Self Daily routines were central to the construction of identity: it was through everyday practices and the routines of daily life that identity was formed and performed.12 Performance, according to the geographer Ruth Panelli, can be seen as the way in which everyday life, social differences, identity and power are enacted through practices that draw on both social meanings and the spaces in which they take place.13 Building on this, we can see how identity—as polite, female, leisured, a housewife, a consumer, honourable, God-fearing—is produced through performance. Indeed, Erving Goffman saw ‘the self [as] a performed character’ that was active, conscious, and knowing.14 In the eighteenth century, polite identity was performed, inter alia, through promenading, and etiquette books were anxious to inform the uninitiated on how they should enact this performance. In his Rules for Good Deportment (1720) Adam Petrie wrote on the relationship between pedestrians, recommending that a gentleman should allow social superiors, women and the infirm either to walk on the right or be given the safety of walking nearest to the wall away from the dirt of the street. It was also rude to stare too directly at other people or to peer closely through the windows of private houses. Fifty years later, the Oxford dancing-master Matthew Towle advised against ‘walking on the heel or toe of the foot, taking too short or long steps, or swinging the arms’.15 Following such instructions allowed the performer to present themselves as polite and genteel. Similarly, rituals of tea drinking— supported by an elaborate paraphernalia of kettles, teapots, sugar bowls, cups and saucers, spoons and tongs—placed emphasis on the performance of making and serving, as well as drinking. Kate Smith highlights the importance in this of deportment and gesture, including the correct physical appearance of the female hand and arm.16 In such daily rituals, social interaction was an engagement between individuals and audiences, and performances were preconceived, scripted and carefully staged. They took place in what Goffman terms front-region or front-stage spaces, such as streets, public gardens, assembly rooms and parlours.17 Other performances were more private, including some religious practices. Attending church services was, of course, a very public enactment of religious piety and social duty, but regular prayer and bible-reading, for example, could take place in private and without a human audience. Like many others, Sarah Savage’s faith led her to read the Bible on a daily basis; more unusually, she noted her thoughts and reactions in her diary, showing an affective engagement with what she read.18 Savage’s Bible reading also points to an alternative way of viewing the relationship between everyday routines and self-identity. Judith Butler
4 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart and others have argued that identities are ‘constructed in and through social action’; self is thus constituted through repeated behaviour and is conditional upon that behaviour.19 Butler’s own work was focused on issues of gender, and much of the historical literature drawing on ideas of performativity shares similar concerns.20 Naturally, many other identities were constructed performatively, perhaps most obviously those of trade and occupation. While formal apprenticeship and guild membership played a part in forming a person’s occupational identity, it was the everyday routines of selling cloth or making shoes that made them a draper or shoemaker. And the routines of work were far more important where formal corporative labels were absent, as they were in much female labour, as Tim Reinke-Williams makes clear in his study of women’s work in early modern London. The ambition to highlight the contribution of both women and men is prominent in the Gender and Work project, where daily practices of work and living in early modern Sweden are studied.21 Everyday work was joined with the regular extension and receipt of credit, witnessing of bonds and other agreements and mutual acts of neighbourliness in building a person’s honour and worth, as Alex Shepard has demonstrated.22 More introspectively, notions of the self as individual could also be shaped by everyday practices—a process that links to emerging ideas of individuality and personality that are seen as characterising the eighteenth century. Something of this is seen in early modern quotidian writing, which, Brodie Waddell argues, tells us much about the concerns of ordinary people whilst consciously constructing a version of personal and wider history.23 We need to be careful here of drawing too firm a distinction between practices and identities that were part of conscious performances and those that arose organically as part of mundane routines of everyday life. The writers studied by Waddell, for example, were in part creating identities through their writing, yet were all more or less conscious of their actions and the ways in which their writing formed part of who they were. Similarly, the actions of those walking the urban streets—shopping and meeting friends, seeing and being seen—were at once a conscious performance of politeness and a performative act of self-creation through everyday routine. To exemplify: on 24 April 1705, the Chester notary, Henry Prescott, noted in his diary (itself a conscious act of self-construction through routine behaviour) that, ‘After a Turn, to Mr Minshalls where Mr Murrey buys a Bible for 1li. 2s. 6d. Wee go, Mr Denton with us, to the Fountain where wee carry on the discourse in singular pints’.24 The transition between activities appears seamless: Prescott moved from promenading to shopping and to socialising, gathering friends along the way. So too was the shift between conscious performance (a man with leisure, walking the city’s streets) and performative routine (apparently casual encounters and visits to the tavern).
Introduction 5
Routines: Social Practices and Society By their very nature, everyday routines comprised the essential building blocks of social practice, social relations and thus society more broadly. This could take numerous forms, of which we highlight just two. First are the routines of sociability that shaped relations between people in a range of social arenas, from royal courts, through spa towns, to village alehouses. Nowhere were the routines as strict as at the European royal courts. Ceremonies of different kinds were essential, as is evident in the handwritten journal of the Swedish Lord Chamberlain, which meticulously describes what happened at the Gustavian court in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from larger state ceremonies to more informal ones.25 A recurrent feature is the physical framework structuring the routines, such as spatial arrangements and furnishing.26 Preserved ego-documents of Duchess (later Queen) Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte (1759–1818) highlights the close relationship between sociability and politics in a broader understanding (also including women).27 In leisure towns, social relations were also structured by convention and routine, as Peter Borsay and others make clear.28 The day was punctuated by ritualised visits to the pump room to take the waters, to the assembly rooms for card parties or balls and perhaps to the theatre or to concert rooms for dramatic or musical performances. At each venue, behaviour and interaction were scaffolded by the shared expectation of politeness and civility. At assemblies, these norms were sometimes codified as a set of ‘rules’ enforced by a master of ceremonies, most famously those set down by Beau Nash at Bath: initially displayed in the Pump Room, they were subsequently published and republished in guides to the town, quickly entering into the collective consciousness of the assembled company.29 More often, politeness and civility were ensured by a less formal combination of self-discipline and public opinion and by the routines that occupied time outside the formal leisure activities of the spa. Amanda Vickery notes the conventions of mutual visiting amongst elite women and the ways in which this took on a formal, almost ritualistic quality, bound by polite etiquette. Such visits—announced in advance via cards and carefully recorded in special almanacs—formalised the routines and practices of social interaction, even if their main purpose was to see and be seen.30 As Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan argue, even shopping was taken into the routines of polite sociability, filling the otherwise empty mornings and offering opportunities for less formal, if still ritualised, social interaction.31 The politeness and civility that marked all of these encounters is seen by Borsay as central in (re)forming the character of English towns and of urban society. Importantly, it also spread into commercial relations, making the English—in Paul
6 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart Langford’s memorable phrase—a polite and commercial people.32 In this, the language, manners and routines of politeness spread into a wide range of commercial practices and shaped the ways in which business relations were articulated and experienced.33 Lower down the social hierarchy, we can see routines of sociability shaping the daily lives of ordinary people, for example through their participation in the conviviality and politics of the alehouse. These were venues of ‘good fellowship’ in which, Mark Hailwood argues, shared drinking played a vital role in cementing social bonds, shaping identities and defining social relations. According to Ann Tlusty, taverns provided ‘a routine meeting place’ where social identities were established and maintained by drinking and gambling. It is worth noting that these routines usually did not include women.34 A second way in which daily routines built into broader social relations and structures is through the everyday practices of the domestic household. This point is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the form and content of Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson’s A Day at Home in Early Modern England.35 In this, they explicitly focus on the rhythms of daily life for the middling sort, organising their analysis as a series of episodes through the day, from rising in the morning and preparing for the day, through the morning’s housework, the mid-day meal and an afternoon of (generally male) paid work, to the more leisured hours of the evening, spent reading, playing games or sewing and eventually back to bed and sleep. Each phase is structured by its own little routines, and the day as a whole is given shape and rhythm by the familiarity of the routine, which changed little over the weeks and months and was shared with middling households across the country. A different set of rhythms emerges from Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths’s analysis of the household duties of Alice le Strange, a gentlewoman living in early seventeenth-century Norfolk.36 Here, the focus is still on the quotidian and routine—but this time viewed through the lens of annual cycles of spending and household management, an approach that also characterised Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery’s analysis of the ways in which country-house owners in the eighteenth century balanced stores against the need to resupply.37 In all these instances, domestic routines were part of broader social and economic processes. This link is made explicit in Karen Harvey’s analysis of the household economy, in which she demonstrates how contemporary rhetoric and practice drew a direct parallel between successful governance and management of the household and that of the country as a whole.38 This links closely to the concept of ‘das ganze Haus’ (the whole house), introduced by Otto Brunner in the 1950s. Despite attracting considerable critical assessment, Brunner’s concept of the house/household as the fundamental structure within society has been influential for early modern European history. In her influential work in the 1980s—An ordered society—Susan Amussen stressed that the early modern household was not only an economic unit but also a social and
Introduction 7 political one. Since the household was used as a metaphor for the state, it was vital for societal order. One consequence of the focus on households and families was that women and men of all classes became important objects of historical enquiry.39 Just like the state, the household was characterised by distinct hierarchies (concerning gender and class) as well as responsibilities and flexibilities. The concept of the household was further developed by Heide Wunder, who emphasised the complementary function of husband and wife as ‘working couples’.40 These studies all show that the household stretched far beyond the actual house—or ‘das ganze Haus’—and would be better captured by what Joachim Eibach calls ‘das offene Haus’ (the open/public house).41 As such, household connections were essential for the daily lives and routines of individuals as well as for their identities.
Spatial Routines: The Importance of Space This focus on the home reminds us that everyday practices and routines had spatial as well as temporal patterns. Geographies of the everyday are apparent in Hamling and Richardson’s analysis, the house comprising a variety of spaces for daily routines.42 Moving through the day, there were chambers for sleeping; a kitchen for cooking; yards and outhouses for washing and brewing; a hall (and later a parlour) for dining; shops, workshops, counting houses and studies as places of work and parlours for leisure and entertaining. The growing specialisation of such rooms is apparent from a series of inventory-based studies that identify how rooms in middling homes were materially and nominally differentiated by function and status.43 And even greater specialisation marked the houses of the elite: libraries, billiard rooms, picture galleries, print rooms, morning rooms, saloons and even ballrooms being added to accommodate a growing array of leisure and social practices.44 Much the same can be seen at the scale of the town: there were assembly rooms, public gardens, theatres, concert rooms and subscription libraries that marked the civic and social credentials of the town and provided appropriate space for their respective cultural functions.45 These were elements in the spaces of modernity mapped out by Miles Ogborn but also spaces that shaped social practices and social interactions.46 As part of the so-called spatial turn, we must also acknowledge spaces of daily routines. These are apparent in Thorsten Hägerstrand’s notion of time-geography, paraphrased by Alan Pred as the ‘choreography of existence’.47 Within this approach, emphasis is placed on the importance of everyday lives—of the mundane and the ordinary—and on the ways in which the movement of people through time and space intersected to shape both individual experiences and the spatiality of the city. These movements were pictorialised by both Hägerstrand and Pred as diagrams showing paths, nodes and bundles that linked individual life-worlds to
8 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart wider socio-economic worlds.48 Going further, historians have become increasingly interested in the ways in which space is socially produced through such everyday routines. In this, the ideas of spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and human geographers including Edward Soja have been particularly influential.49 Lefebvre argued that space was socially produced in three main ways: as codified ‘representations of space’, conceived and controlled by planners and elites; as ‘spaces of representation’, which challenge or subvert dominant spatial practices and spatialities and as ‘spatial practices’—the product of routine and routinised activities.50 It is the last of these that concerns us here. Linking back to the ideas of Hägerstrand and Pred, Michel de Certeau has argued that the city is created by people’s movement through and appropriation of space. He writes how ‘their intertwined paths give their shape to spaces. They weave places together’.51 In other words, space is produced through the routines of everyday life. The relationship between space and social action cuts both ways: space shaped daily routines by forming the active context in which the practices and performances of everyday life unfolded. Within the home, the growing specialisation of rooms shaped the kinds of behaviour and routines that took place therein: bedchambers, for example, were increasingly places to sleep rather than receive visitors, while parlours shifted in the opposite direction, and dining rooms gradually became dedicated spaces, with the table remaining assembled and positioned permanently in the centre of the room.52 Assembly rooms were also organised in a way that reflected and impacted upon their function. The basic requirements were for a ballroom, card room and tea room, thus accommodating each aspect of the assembly in its own dedicated space. Their arrangement within the building controlled the flow of people during assemblies, and their size, shape and furnishings dictated the kinds of interaction that could take place in each room. Much the same was true of newsrooms and subscription libraries. At the Liverpool Athenaeum, for example, there was a newsroom, library and committee room, the prospectus emphasising the spatial and practical separation of newsroom and library, stating that ‘the two establishments will be kept perfectly distinct from one another’ and fitting up one after the manner of a coffee room and the other as more sober and private space, lined with bookshelves and intended primarily for reading.53 In this sense, space as well as people have agency—as do the objects with which rooms were furnished. Indeed, it is readily apparent how spaces and assemblages of objects were critical in both enabling and shaping all manner of daily routines. This is apparent in the myriad objects examined in Hamling and Richardson’s analysis, from gaming dice to table desks to pewterware.54 More specifically, Sara Pennell shows how the shifting organisation and equipment found in English kitchens, from suites of ancillary rooms through stoves and ovens to saucepans and copperware,
Introduction 9 fundamentally altered the ways in which cooking took place and thus also the routines in which cooks and kitchen maids were engaged.55 In the dining room, everyday eating practices were fitted around the dining table and shaped by the spatial arrangement of dishes; routines of hygiene were shaped by the provision of table linen and increasingly of knives and forks.56 Sociability in the parlour shifted from the polite circle to less formal and more mobile arrangements of furniture and people— a contrast drawn most starkly in Humphrey Repton’s famous contrast between the Cedar Parlour and the Modern Living Room.57 Beyond the home, commercial interactions within shops were shaped by the type and array of fittings. Goods were not hidden away but were rarely available to unmediated browsing by customers, other than in specialist areas such as bookshops.58 The counter was thus central to transactions, becoming the focal point for the exchange of information, goods, cash and credit but also sociable conversation and gossip, as the studies of Claire Walsh, Nancy Cox, Bruno Blondé and others make clear.59 Behind the shop, there might be further soft-selling in the parlour, structured by the furnishings of respectable sociability, or we might find a range of workshops for processing groceries, making candles or working precious metals or counting houses and storerooms. In each, the arrangement of equipment and fittings would give shape to the work undertaken there.60 In workshops and factories, the lathe, loom or forge were, of course, central to the rhythms and routines of manual labour; on the street, pavements, steps, railings, hanging signs, window displays etc. all shaped the passage of people.61
Daily Routines The study of everyday routines offers not simply an important window into the lives of a wide range of people but also a powerful analytical tool. The repeated nature of actions and their recurrence on a regular basis makes them critical in shaping identities, society and space. The current volume builds on these ideas, examining everyday lives and routines in a variety of contexts across Europe and beyond. It offers a series of case studies of people, places and practices that demonstrate how the minutiae of everyday life mattered during the long eighteenth century— insights that are only possible through the micro-historical perspective adopted by each contributor. The chapters bring together and juxtapose different spaces and venues—including homes, streets, tea houses, assembly rooms and ships—and highlight the constructive overlap between different networks of daily activity: domestic, commercial, leisure and political. Together, they offer a better understanding of how the daily routines of individual lives bridged notions of private and public, local and national, domestic and commercial. They also provide a variety of perspectives on the agency of space in terms of bounded spaces such as
10 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart the garden or the ship, more fluid spaces like streets, and relational spaces of networks and movement. As a whole, then, the volume provides both empirical richness and a model for how social histories of the everyday can be written in a way that focuses on the mundane to highlight broader social, spatial and cultural processes. The chapters are arranged in three sections, where routines are linked to these different kinds of space. The first, Domestic routines, focuses on daily life within the household; the second, Public lives, explores the routines created in public spaces, outside the household; the third, Home and away examines something of the interplay and movement of people outside the home and especially on journeys. Together, the three sections span a large geographic area, covering several European and non-European countries (England, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, the USA and Japan) and a ship on its way to China. Although most concentrate on urban areas, the chapters are varied when it comes to occupations, social status and gender, ranging from Swedish count Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna to common labourers in Amsterdam, and from the Philadelphia merchant’s wife Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker to gardeners in rural England. Most of the voices of the people studied here belong to the middling sort: a group that gained considerable societal influence during the period studied and were increasingly able to shape their towns as well as their homes. A variety of sources has been analysed to uncover the daily routines. Ego documents like diaries and letters are well suited for the task, but so are account books, legal sources, minutes, travelogues, log books and extant material objects. Together, these offer rich insights into people’s daily lives and daily routines. Here again variety is important as it allows us to make comparisons between regions and countries, between social status and gender, and between town and country. Furthermore, it provides a larger context when analysing routines. Still, some striking consistencies appear that highlight the significance of daily routines in structuring the lives of individuals. In Domestic Routines, we visit households in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury England and Sweden. Setting out from domestic expenditure, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson show how the material culture of the household structured daily life. The account books and inventories they deploy show how money was spent on acquiring goods but also on mending, cleaning and maintaining household belongings. Investment in material goods varied according to stage in life cycle as well as social status and thus formed complex temporalities. The economic nature of everyday routines is also highlighted in the chapter by Helen Brown and Jon Stobart. They explore the expenditure of time and money on the English country-house garden, assessing this in terms of annual, seasonal and daily rhythms of work and spending. Central to their analysis is an understanding that routine and mundane activities were fundamental in
Introduction 11 shaping the garden. In the chapters by Thomas McGrath and Johanna Ilmakunnas, the importance of work in relation to routines is emphasised. McGrath shows how the Manchester manufacturer Samuel Greg organised his life—and home—around his business, much to his wife’s discontent. When the family acquired a rural home at Quarry Bank, personal comfort and convenience became a more pronounced part of their routines—a shift in emphasis that was much appreciated by Hannah Greg. Ilmakunnas focuses on work within the aristocracy. Apart from estate management and political tasks, she argues that social life and entertaining should be regarded as work when it comes to elite families. By analysing count Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s diary, she shows how his daily routines varied according to age: where upbringing and education dominated the early years, personal interest became more important for adults, as did a more peaceful life on the country estate. The investigation of the social and economic character of domestic routines highlights the complexity of the practices of an early modern household, in relation to goods, in the tension between urban and rural and in the dependence on life-stage and work. It also underlines the need to consider social status, gender, life cycle and personal interests when interpreting routines. The second section, Public Space, moves away from the household and to the bustling cities of Amsterdam and Edo (present day Tokyo) and the rather less crowded but still lively Åbo/Turku in present day Finland. Through a quantitative analysis of witness statements, the streets of Amsterdam are analysed from a macro and micro perspective. Bob Pierik shows that urban mobility of non-elite women and men was far more widespread than hitherto assumed. Gender was a significant factor in structuring daily routines, determining the distances involved in everyday mobility and the reason for moving through the city. Yet Pierik also demonstrates the importance of neighbourhood in shaping the parameters of daily lives and shows how this was delineated through people’s routine spatial practices. Bébio Amaro draws on diaries to explore the daily lives of a smaller number of residents and visitors to Edo in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. This is some way beyond our main period, but Edo at that time bore many similarities with the ancient regime of early modern Europe. Thus, it catches Edo (a place structured around traditional social and cultural distinctions) at a key moment of transformation into a modern city. He argues that routines and experiences were shaped by race and gender but also by the physical environment and social milieu in different zones of the city. The approach taken by both Pierik and Amaro allows them to bring a range of settings and people into their analysis. In contrast, Topi Artukka focuses on the routines revolving around a single building: the Assembly House in Åbo/Turku. This was part of a Europe-wide process that saw the construction of a variety of social and cultural facilities for the middling and upper strata
12 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart of society. Artukka shows how the Assembly House introduced new cultural practices and how it created a scene for everyday life, both at formal occasions such as balls and in the more routine practices of social dining. As with Ilmakunnas, he sees sociability as an essential ingredient in elite work: part of their need to enhance their social as well as cultural capital. A recurring theme in these chapters is how access to space shaped the daily routines and, more importantly, that this access was restricted. In Amsterdam, gender was the prime determinant, in Åbo social status and ambitions and in Edo nationality and gender. In the third section, the focus switches to the seemingly seamless movements between Home and Away. Three distinct focal points are studied: the small Swedish town of Arboga, the busy colonial city of Philadelphia, and a Swedish East India Company ship. Gudrun Andersson shows that moving around was essential for the councilman and merchant Kihlberg. His diary contains daily observations about his movements: journeys to—from his perspective—faraway places like Stockholm, to nearby destinations and, on a daily basis, within his hometown. Andersson’s analysis shows how the spatial and temporal were intertwined and that being away from home could involve a wide range of routines and rhythms. A similar pattern is evident in Philadelphia. Against the backdrop of revolution, the three people studied by Emma Hart constantly moved around in the city and, depending on their prosperity, out into rural environments. Their everyday itineraries shaped the rhythms of their lives, both reflecting and reinforcing political, social, religious and gender identities. Hart emphasises that the dichotomy between public and private is too sharp to be useful as an analytical tool for understanding everyday routines, a conclusion that permeates all the chapters in the book. For men working for an East India Company, the ship can be interpreted as home and away at the same time. Journeys would last for months, even years, and Lisa Hellman shows how the routines shifted dramatically from isolation on board to intercultural entanglements when in port and travelling in convoy with other ships. All three chapters in this section also deal with routines in extraordinary circumstances: the Finnish war between Sweden and Russia (1808–1809), meant that the military was present in many towns; due to the American Revolution, the British army occupied Philadelphia and other cities, and embarking a vessel destined for the Far East was, in itself, extraordinary. In all three cases, the townspeople and sailors made efforts to maintain normal routines: they incorporated the political turmoil in their daily lives, and they distanced themselves from the occupants. On board, life on land was recreated in many ways, especially with the aim of maintaining established hierarchies of class and status. The three sets of chapters thus form different windows on—and approaches to—everyday life in Europe over the course of the long eighteenth century. Together they provide an insight into the complexities but
Introduction 13 also the profound importance of people’s daily routines both to their own lives and to the wider process of social, economic and cultural change.
Notes 1. James Woodforde, The Diary of a Country Parson, 1758–1802 (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 1999), 121. 2. Ibid., 121. 3. Ibid., v. 4. Richard Gough, History of Myddle (1979; London: Penguin, 1981). 5. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Montaillou. Village occitan de 1294 à 1324 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975). 6. See, for example, Annie Fourcaut, ‘De la classe au territoire ou du social a l’urbain’, Le Mouvement Social 200 (2002): 170–76; Isabelle Backouche, ‘L’histoire urbaine en France. Nouvel objet, nouvelles approches’, Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine 32, no. 1 (2003): 7–14. 7. Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Stephen Hindle, On the Parish: the Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England, c. 1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 8. Eva Österberg and Sølvi Sogner, eds., People Meet the Law. Control and Conflict Handling in the Courts: The Nordic Countries in the Post-Reformation and Pre-Industrial Period (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2000); Marie Lind stedt Cronberg, Synd och skam. Ogifta mödrar på svensk landsbygd 1680– 1880 (Tygelsjö: Cronberg publ., 1997); Gudrun Andersson, Tingets kvinnor och män. Genus som norm och strategi under 1600- och 1700-tal (Uppsala: Studia Historica Upsaliensia, 1998); Hilde Sandvik, Kvinners rettslige hand leevne på 1600- og 1700-tallet, med linjer fram til gifte kvinners myndighet i 1888 (Oslo: Acta Humaniora, 2002). 9. Martin Dinges, Der Mauermeister und der Finanzrichter. Ehre, Geld und soziale Kontrolle im Paris des 18. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994); Alf Lüdtke, ed., The History of Everyday Life. Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Hans Medick, Weben und Überleben in Laichingen 1650–1900. Lokalgeschichte als allgemeine Geschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996); David Warren Sabean, Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 10. Giovanni Levi, ‘On Microhistory’, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 95–97. 11. Ibid.; Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István Szijártó, What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2013), 4–5. 12. On identity formation, see Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute, eds., Through a Glass Darkly. Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self. Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Keith Jenkins, Social Identity, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008). 13. Ruth Panelli, Social Geographies. From Difference to Action (London: Sage, 2004), 248. 14. Erving Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 252. See also Matthew McCormack, Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 35–44.
14 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart 15. Adam Petrie, The Rules of Good Deportment (1720), in The Works of Adam Petrie (Edinburgh: Scottish Literary Club, 1877), 6–7; M. Towle, The Young Gentleman and Lady’s Private Tutor (Oxford, 1771), 130–37, 148–49, 168–69. For a more general discussion of these practices, see Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c.1680–1830 (London: Routledge, 2007), 101–4. 16. Kate Smith, ‘In Her Hands. Materialising Distinction in Georgian Britain’, Cultural and Social History 11, no. 4 (2014): 489–506. 17. Goffman, Presentation of Self. See also Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, ‘Consumption, Shopping and Gender’, in Retailing, Consumption and Capital: Towards the New Retail Geography, ed. Nick Wrigley and Michelle Lowe (Harlow: Longman, 1996), 221–37; 226; Peter Borsay, ‘All the Town’s a Stage: Urban Ritual and Ceremony, 1660–1800’, in The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1600–1800, ed. Peter Clark (London: Hutchinson, 1989), 228–58. 18. Michael Smith, ‘The Affective Communities of Protestantism in North West England, c.1660—c.1740’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2017), 60–61. 19. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 2000), 25. 20. See, for example: M. Ågren, Domestic Secrets. Women & Property in Sweden, 1600–1857 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2009); McCormack, Independent Man. 21. Tim Reinke-Williams, Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Marie Ågren, ed., Making a Living, Making a Difference. Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 22. Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 23. Brodie Waddell, ‘Writing History from Below: Chronicling and Record-Keeping in Early Modern England’, History Workshop Journal 85 (2018): 239–64. 24. John Addy, ed., ‘The Diary of Henry Prescott, Vol. I’, in Records Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (April 24, 1705), 127. 25. The Gustavian court refers to the court during the absolutist reigns of Gustav III (1746–1792) and his son Gustav IV Adolph (1778–1837), 1771–1809. 26. Mikael Alm and Bo Vahlne, Överkammarherrens journal 1778–1826. Ett gustavianskt tidsdokument (Stockholm: Kungl. Samfundet för utgivande av handlingar rörande Skandivaviens historia, 2010). 27. My Hellsing, ‘Court and Public in Late Eighteenth-Century Stockholm: The Royal Urban Life of Duchess Charlotte, c.1790’, The Court Historian 20, no. 1 (2015): 43–60; My Hellsing, Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte. Hertiginnan vid det gustavianska hovet (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2015). 28. Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Stobart et al., Spaces of Consumption. 29. Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 275–76. 30. Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 274–76, 294–95. 31. Stobart et al., Spaces of Consumption, 104–6. 32. Borsay, English Urban Renaissance; Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 33. See, for example, Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, ‘Commerce and the Commodity: Graphic Display and Selling New Consumer Goods in Eighteenthcentury England’, in Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Michael North
Introduction 15 and David Ormrod (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 187–200; Jon Stobart, ‘Selling (through) Politeness: Advertising Provincial Shops in Eighteenthcentury England’, Cultural and Social History 5, no. 3 (2008): 309–28. 34. Mark Hailwood, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014); See also B. Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order. The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001). 35. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). It is worth noting that these routines would have been less fully developed for labouring people, who would have spent the bulk of their time working. 36. Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth Household (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 37. Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, Consumption and the Country House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 85–88. 38. Karen Harvey, The Little Republic. Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 39. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society. Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New York: Colombia University Press, 1988). 40. Heide Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon. Women in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998). See also Ågren, Making a Living; Harvey, Little Republic. 41. Joachim Eibach, ‘Das offene Haus. Kommunikative Praxis im sozialen Nahraum der europäischen Frühen Neuzeit’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 38, no. 4 (2011): 621–64. 42. Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home. 43. Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1996); Mark Overton et al., Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600–1750 (London: Routledge, 2004); Gudrun Andersson, ‘A Mirror of Oneself: Possessions and the Manifestation of Status among a Swedish Local Elite, 1650–1770’, Cultural and Social History 3, no. 1 (2006): 21–44. 44. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978); John Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014); Mimi Hellman, ‘Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (1999): 415–45. 45. See Borsay, English Urban Renaissance; Dag Lindström, ‘Leisure Culture, Entrepreneurs and Urban Space: Swedish Towns in a European Perspective, Eighteenth-nineteenth Centuries’, in Leisure Cultures in Urban Europe c. 1700–1870. A Transnational Perspective, ed. Peter Borsay and Jan Hein Furnée (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 140–60. 46. Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1780 (New York: Guildford Press, 1998). See also Stobart et al., Spaces of Consumption, 57–85. 47. Thorsten Hägerstrand, ‘What about People in Regional Science?’ in Papers and Proceedings of the Regional Science Association 24 (1970): 7–21; Alan Pred, ‘The Choreography of Existence: Comments on Hägerstrand’s TimeGeography and its Usefulness’, in Human Geography: An Essential Anthology, ed. Jonathan Agnew, David Livingstone, and Alistair Rogers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 636–49. 48. Alan Pred, Lost Words and Lost Worlds. Modernity and the Language of Everyday Life in Late Nineteenth-Century Stockholm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
16 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart 49. See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); Edwards Soja, Thirdspace (Oxford, Blackwell, 1996). 50. For a fuller discussion and application of these ideas, see Stobart et al., Spaces of Consumption, esp. 21–22. 51. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 97. 52. Overton et al, Production and Consumption; Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors. 53. See Stobart et al., Spaces of Consumption, 118–20. 54. Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home. 55. Sara Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1850 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 56. Wetherill, Consumer Behaviour; Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home. Family and Material Culture 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Woodruff Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800 (London: Routledge, 2002), Göran Ulväng, Herrgårdarnas historia. Arbete, liv och bebyggelse på uppländska herrgårdar (Uppsala: Hallgren & Björklund, 2008); Gudrun Andersson, Stadens dignitärer. Den lokala elitens status- och maktmanifestation i Arboga 1650–1770 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009). 57. See Girouard, Life in the English Country House, 237. 58. Richard Fallon, ‘ “Stuffd Up with Books”: The Bookshops and Businesses of Thomas Payne and Son, 1740–1831’, History of Retailing and Consumption 5, no. 3 (2019): 228–45. 59. Claire Walsh, ‘Shop Design and the Display of Goods in Eighteenth-century London,’ Journal of Design History 8 (1995): 157–76; Nancy Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing, 1550–1820 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Bruno Blondé and Ilja Van Damme, ‘The Shop, the Home and the Retail Revolution: Antwerp, Seventeenth-eighteenth Centuries,’ Città & Storia II, no. 2 (2007): 335–50. See also Jan-Heine Furnée and Cle Lesger, eds., The Landscape of Consumption: Shopping Streets and Cultures in Western Europe, 1600–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 60. Matthew Jenkins and Jon Stobart, ‘The Shop and the Home: Commercial and Domestic Space in Eighteenth-century England,’ in Micro-geographies of the Western City, c.1750–1900, ed. Alida Clemente, Dag Lindström, and Jon Stobart (London: Routledge, 2021). 61. See, for example: Stobart et al., Spaces of Consumption, 86–110; Christophe Loir and Thomas Schlesser, ‘Sidewalks and Alignment of the Streets: The Gap between Large-scale Planning and the Building-scale in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Brussels-Paris)’, in Micro-geographies of the Western City, c.1750–1900, ed. Alida Clemente, Dag Lindström and Jon Stobart (London: Routledge, 2021).
Part I
Domestic Routines
1 Lifestyles and Lifespans Domestic Material Culture and the Temporalities of Daily Life in Seventeenth-Century England Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson This chapter is concerned with the relationship between materialities and temporalities in the seventeenth-century domestic household, because the interest in the eighteenth century explored throughout this volume requires a contextual setting. We argue that a focus on material culture suggests a complex, multitemporal understanding of the domestic setting during this earlier period, that engagement with objects involved situating their trajectories both backwards and forwards in time, and that this multitemporal understanding was a key feature of daily life. Picking up on Daniel Woolf’s observation about early modern England, that it experienced a changing historical culture—an uneasy accommodation to change that went hand-in-hand with shifting attitudes to the acceptability of novelty and innovation—we see the seventeenth century as a fascinating, often contradictory, period of flux.1 It was during this century of accelerating change in physical, social, religious, and economic environments that the transition from medieval to modern habits of thought and consumption occurred, with some fundamental shifts in the nature and understanding of domestic fabric and furnishings. Many of the social and cultural characteristics associated with the eighteenth century—the rise of the ‘middling sort’ as influential consumers, the proliferation of imported wares as well as native craft industries, and the development of taste in response to international fashions—can actually be identified with the preceding ‘long’ century. The period from 1570 through the seventeenth century is also associated with an unprecedented degree of investment in domestic building; the ‘great re-building[s]’ of housing stock.2 Yet this was also the first period of cultural antiquarianism with its fondness for the materials of the past; Woolf has pointed to the role of the exchange of antiquities and the growing quantity of published historical material in producing a new consciousness of the past in relation to contemporary concerns.3 We are interested in how these forces of tradition and novelty played out for individuals in the context of furnishing and provisioning their households, and how this domestic material culture responded— and contributed—to a sense of being present in longer cycles of time. Jonathan Gil Harris has used the term polychronic to suggest the ability of an object to draw upon and signal many different moments,
20 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson dates, periods, or ages of time. His formulation of polychronicity not only refers to how matter is marked by the traces of multiple times but provides a critical framework with which to theorise how we physically and imaginatively rework matter to produce diverse organisations of time.4 Domestic objects, which make mnemonic reference to the moment at—and circumstances in which—they enter the household, are especially resonant in these terms. In taking up this theme, we consider the interplay between shorter-term routines of cleaning, maintenance, and mending, which different types of households underwent during the year, and longer-term investment in items bound up with concepts and strategies of inheritance (hearth furniture and other decoration, wooden furniture and ceramic chargers).5 The recording of details of provenance within an object’s decoration or in sources such as wills, journals, and account books shows that owners were interested and invested in the journeys of things through space and time. Exploring attitudes towards the way things fitted into the daily routines associated with purchase, maintenance, renewal, and inheritance therefore highlights the nature of the domestic as a container and vehicle for various kinds of memory, as well as the site of forward planning, thereby exposing the complex temporalities involved in the routine practices and materials of daily life. Running a household required being especially aware of the timescales of things, in understanding the processes of their production and supply, the extent of their durability or ephemerality, the maintenance that would be required, and the additional resources and care this would necessitate at given points in time. But the extent to which these reflections are evident within our sources suggests a differing sensitivity to the responsibilities of householding according to social status. In our discussion, we explore how a sense of multi-temporality played out for individuals depending on a range of factors including distinctions of status and region, access to markets, type of property (including old or new, rural or urban), and, importantly, materials and manufacture (the type of object and its symbolic associations as well as its mode of manufacture). In doing so, we aim to start a conversation about the various ways in which people reflected on lifespans, as well as lifestyles, through their domestic things. We explore how daily routine, which is by its nature both regular and ephemeral— focused in the moment—relates to the more enduring material culture of the household. We explore how the multiple temporalities that are inherent in furniture, furnishings, and domestic objects, as a result of their acquisition and maintenance, structured both daily life and the life cycle.
Domestic Purchases In this section, we analyse account books in order to begin to establish how regular domestic purchases were across differences of status and
Lifestyles and Lifespans 21 geographical location and to set up later eighteenth-century practices against the daily lives and routines that preceded them. Although the sample of evidence considered here is modest, making reference to only a small number of households, it offers suggestive models to be tested in other places and periods. ‘Domestic things’ as a category altered depending on status. In Sir Thomas Puckering’s 1620 account book (more later), for example, a wide range of subjects sit under the cover’s heading of ‘Housekeeping’, including money spent on his family and household staff, on recreation, and on his own and his servants’ travels and business undertaken in relation to his lands and various properties. For the untitled, housekeeping was more clearly focussed on a single building, in decreasing levels of complexity as the social scale is descended. Here, we concentrate on the routines associated with durable items of furniture and furnishings and their maintenance (originally seen, of course, in the context of more numerous purchases of food and semi-durables), considering them because the idea of ‘house’ depends upon the timespans of the objects that stay longer than a few days (they provide a context for other, more fleeting routines) and gains much of its social distinction, we argue, in the distinct balance of lasting and ephemeral goods it contains. Second, we look at durables because reconstructing their regimes of temporality reveals mentalities surrounding the capacity of the domestic as a vehicle for displays of conspicuous consumption and identity in forms that can be bequeathed from one generation to the next. Our aim here is twofold: first, we establish how frequently money was spent on the household’s fabric and therefore how regularly new or altered items might have been encountered in domestic spaces, refreshing those rooms visually and in terms of the practices with which they were associated. Second, we determine how frequently things had to be mended, cleaned, or otherwise maintained, in order to assess the regularity of intervention in furniture and furnishings. In putting those two aspects together, a strong sense of the extent of thought and organisation that domestic materiality necessitated can be established. We explore in detail the domestic purchases recorded by two men. As with all keepers of account books, their standing, mentality, and practice were to an extent unique, and these peculiarities shape the nature of the purchases they made and recorded. The first is Sir Thomas Puckering (1591–1637) of The Priory in Warwick and his wife Jane Chowne.6 Thomas was the only son of Sir John Puckering (1543–1596), Privy Councillor to Elizabeth I and Keeper of the Great Seal, but Thomas’s own career was considerably lower profile. Failing to join the court, he became sheriff of Warwickshire in 1625 and represented Tamworth in Staffordshire in the parliaments of 1621, 1625, 1626, and 1628. His annual wealth, estimated at over £2,000 in lands, put him in the middling group of midlands gentry. Above this group were men like Lord Brooke—with £4,500—and
22 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson below them the minor gentry with an income of under £100 per annum.7 Puckering’s account book covers just one year, 1620, the first of his parliamentary career but before his daughters were born.8 Likely to have been seen as the start of a promising political career (although in fact it did not turn out that way), this context might be expected to have given him an acute sense of his status and the need to express it through domestic embellishment. As a result of his new responsibilities, Puckering spent half of the year in London, and this had a profound impact on the way he furnished his household. In contrast, John Hayne was a second-generation cloth merchant from a family long-resident in Exeter, with an annual expenditure of around £1609 (equivalent to lower Midlands gentry income). He started his account book as he began independent householding, marrying Susan Henly of Winsham at the age of twenty-six, and moving lodgings three times to get closer to the town centre. The comparison of these men’s spending patterns gives us insight into the distinctions and connections between the temporal cycles of gentry and upper middling changes in furniture and furnishing and an indication of the more general movement of fashion in household renewal and upgrading across the middle of the seventeenth century. The difference in the nature of purchases between an already established and fully equipped household with an extant workforce and round of operations and a newly established then quickly rising young (in status and age) household suggest that novelty plays an important role in both but with different timescales and emphases. As can be seen in Table 1.1, the majority of the domestic payments Puckering made were for upkeep, cleaning, and washing. This type of payment was concentrated on the service areas of the house and shows clearly both the scale of domestic operations of a household of this status and the relative attention that must have been paid to keep it functioning through such work. We get a sense of the rhythm of the year: two shillings was paid in April for ‘mending, boiling, and burnishing 2 silver candlesticks, and a stope’; Calais sand was bought three times, once in June and twice in July, for ‘scowring the vessell’; the cook’s knives were ground twice during the year, in May and December; and in the latter month the chimney in the kitchen was swept. Throughout, 4d. of starch was bought for Lady Puckering’s maid, suggesting a weekly routine of washing and pressing her linens, with the exception of July when a bulk purchase was made more cheaply in London. From October to March, saffron was bought to colour the linen, and blue was added to the order in November and January, perhaps for Christmas celebrations. Puckering also kept several local craftsmen on retainer, paying them an annual ‘allowance’ to ensure their prompt service when needed. An unnamed glazier, for example, received 6s. 8d. half-yearly ‘for keeping the glasse windowes of my house in repaire’.10 Such activities are undertaken on a scale very far removed from Hayne’s experience. They were well planned
Lifestyles and Lifespans 23 Table 1.1 Sir Thomas Puckering’s domestic expenditure, 1620. Category
Number of purchases
Total spent
Alteration/mending/cleaning Bedding Building Carriage of goods Dining (inc. silverware) Fittings Furnishing (soft) Furniture Gardening Heating Kitchen equipment Lighting Security
108 2 92 47 1 22 10 14 93 1 4 2 14
£7 7s £3 8d £55 9s 4½d £21 12s 10¾d £20 14s £31 £7 17s 5d £14 17s £32 8s 8d 10d 16s 10d 9s 6d £2 7s 9d
Source: Mark Merry and Catherine Richardson (eds.) The Household Account Book of Sir Thomas Puckering of Warwick, 1620 (Stratford-upon-Avon: Dugdale Society, 2012) Note: Only expenditure that relates to The Priory (rather than his other rented properties) has been included. Several of Puckering’s categories do not appear in Hayne’s accounts, for instance, large sums of money spent on medicines, or the visits of travelling players. The aim here has been to compare spending in areas where the two men’s expenditure overlaps and to show where expenditure on areas of the house itself is explicitly different, for instance in Puckering’s emphasis on building and gardening.
partly by Puckering himself and partly by his servants, of whom he had around twenty-five, including a steward, pantler, clerk, and chamberlain, considerable amounts of whose time could be spent attending to such matters. There were also many irregular payments for repairs to the house and its contents throughout the year, the majority relating to its service areas. This type of repair represents the bulk of the interventions in the material culture of The Priory in 1620. In the kitchen, Puckering recorded payment for weights to be cast for the rack and later for the smith’s ironwork on it and for the jack and a pair of pothooks to be mended. He also recorded a variety of other ironwork including ‘2 hooks, and 2 staples for the scales in my Lardour’.11 He paid the cooper’s bill for work on the baker and brewer and the washmaid’s vessels; the tinker ‘for mending 2 posnets, and a kettle’, and then for mending the laundry maid’s kettle.12 In other service areas of the house a joiner mended two rat traps and hung racks in the cheese loft, and the lesser oven in the bake house and the cooler in the brewhouse were attended to, as were various pumps.13 Such restorations demonstrate the amount of work undertaken by Puckering’s servants and their close engagement with their working tools. They indicate how significant the role of Freckleton, Puckering’s steward, must have been in organising a constant round of mending, without which the house could not function.
24 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson Only a small number of payments for upkeep relate to the domestic rooms: the feet of a pair of andirons were mended, as were some Venice glasses, and the shovelboard table was planed. The majority of the tasks undertaken in these rooms, rather, were those involving Puckering’s chamberlain Robert Lewis’s work with upholstery. He mended and retrimmed the seats of some ‘turkie work’ stools and velvet chairs and altered the matting in the chambers.14 Fabric was purchased for items that fall partway between repair and renewal and new goods: carpets, hall-cloths, dresser-cloths, and plate-cloths—things that protected the more durable furniture and objects they covered—and new matting for the hall chamber. Although maintenance was less regular here, it was extensive and expensive; it was planned rather than reactive and organised by a specified official. The other areas of spending that show large numbers of payments are for building and gardening, both of which included new projects but also regular maintenance, and these indicate that The Priory’s major routines during 1620 were focused on both the inside and the outside of the property. These latter involved a workforce of local labour (female as well as male for menial jobs in the garden) and specialist trades from further afield, such as a plasterer from Bromsgrove.15 Traditional material cultural scholarship has largely ignored such pragmatic routines of maintenance, cleaning, and mending, focusing instead on more obviously aesthetic practices. It is here, however, given their volume, that we truly get to grips with the impact of things on daily life: the time spent planning, executing, and then accounting for the range of small purchases that upkeep involved must have ensured it formed a constant undercurrent of the routine of the household. This routine structured the year with seasonal points of emphasis (matting secured for movement between summer and winter lodgings) and celebratory changes (for the increased burden on the kitchen in particular approaching the Christmas season). In contrast to regular cycles of repair, maintenance, and washing, the number of durable items bought for the house was relatively small. There was a range of things useful within domestic production processes: for instance, Puckering reimbursed his dairymaid for ‘a paile, 2 cheese-fats, a skimming dish, and 4 cheese-clothes’, and he paid for several items for preserving.16 Again for the kitchen, he paid the joiner 1s 4d for ‘3 moulds to print gingerbread on’, and he bought two peels for pastry;17 outside, he recorded purchase of a rake and two tin watering pots for his garden, ‘a strike to lye in my Limehouse, to measure lime with’, and a lantern for his porter’s lodge. This balance between new and renovated goods suggests servants’ familiarity with their working tools and a material environment in which skills could be honed utilising familiar objects. In domestic rooms, the number of new objects was smaller still. They fall into two clear categories: things made in-house and those bought ready-made. In the latter category are two ‘screen fans’, presumably for
Lifestyles and Lifespans 25 the fire and, from London, a ‘china-work fruit-table’ bought for 44s., a case of knives for 10s., and two ‘silver stopes [stoups, or cups] weighing 72 ounces’ for £20 14s. (representing the only entry in the ‘dining’ category in Table 1.1).18 The noted decoration of the fruit table and its high cost suggests it may well have been imported, its purchase adding instant exoticism. The easy availability of London markets for provincial buyers, accessible through close (geographical or executive) ties, was crucial to such purchases. A gradual and incremental choice of different elements, however, characterised the design process for the items made in-house. Robert Lewis the chamberlain was involved in three large projects during 1620, in addition to his mending and alterations: making a green taffeta bed and a featherbed for Elizabeth Puckering and a couch chair. The overall cost of the couch chair was £11 10s 4d, making up the vast amount of the expenditure in the ‘furniture’ category in Table 1.1. Puckering bought the frame and the green velvet with which to cover it in London, and Lewis travelled down to London with the family, presumably advising on the purchase. Master and servant apparently bought these elements together, but the latter was responsible for the finer details: Lewis purchased deep green silk fringe for edging, a fringe to cover the seams, ‘suitable’ (i.e., matching), apparently also in London,19 but sackcloth, webbing and tacks, coarse canvas to make the chair’s back and wings, sewing thread and green buckram to line them, its stuffing, and fabric for a case, all in Warwick. He then apparently made the piece up when back at The Priory. The length of time over which such a relatively modest project (in terms of visual impact rather than cost) was planned and executed—payments stretch from the end of March to the beginning of August—is also instructive, giving a sense of the foresight required to maintain a household at an appropriate aesthetic level by renewing its furniture. The couch chair was, by his death in 1637, one of four Puckering owned: probably not used particularly regularly, it was not an item bought out of daily necessity but rather one that took its place as a fitting part of a wider whole. John Hayne was making his accounts sixteen to twenty years later than Puckering, in a prosperous port town. The two men’s domestic situations were also very different. Hayne had no chamberlain or steward, although he did have household servants of a menial rather than executive kind. He rented his dwelling house so paid only for fixtures and fittings, rather than large building projects. Puckering built a banqueting house and reshaped his garden to accommodate it in 1620, whereas Hayne undertook projects such as altering his buttery with three new deal shelves and a dressing board.20 The need to fit the house out to perform tasks with goods appropriate to their social situation was important to both men, therefore, as was the process of planning towards an ideal arrangement that might speak to the status of the children both anticipated when they
26 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson began their accounts (in 1620 and 1634). We might see this as a more flexible and creative process for Hayne, with less pre-existing material (domestic and social) to play with. Hayne’s strategies for building up a household appropriate to his sense of status appear plainly here—first, in advance of his marriage, he invests in furniture; then, in the year of his marriage, he spends money on bedding. In the year he begins to rent independently and set up his own household he spends the majority of his money on more furniture, on dining goods, and on soft furnishings. In 1638, Hayne’s purchases are mainly of kitchen stuff, which suggests he is engaging in increasingly elaborate cookery—a brass scummer, custard pans, skillets, saucers, chafing and baking dishes, plus some equipment for butter and beer. Furniture purchases are once again few and far between: he buys a cradle and reimburses his wife for a little black trunk with a lock, and smaller goods and fittings include curtains for his child’s chamber, various locks and keys, and four small pictures, purchased from a man called Hornabrooke for 1s.21 Although the pattern of acquisition differs between Hayne and Puckering, then, there is a much clearer imperative both to set up a household from scratch and to keep it updated from Hayne, who in fact spends more money on furnishings in 1636 than his superior. He also spent comparable sums on furniture (when his bulk purchases are taken into account) and security, as we can see in Table 1.2. Comparing the different provenances of Hayne’s and Puckering’s goods is also instructive. Shopping in London was not just an elite preserve. Such purchases were increasingly familiar to the middling sort in early seventeenth-century towns and form part of their assertion of economic and aesthetic clout. Unlike Puckering, the provincial middling sort rarely went to London themselves, instead employing the services of a footpost or courier.22 Purchases were on a smaller scale, as individual objects: in 1641 Hayne acquired an ‘inlaid chesboard with black and white men’ for £1 3s, for instance. On the other hand, as a merchant he was also, unlike Puckering, presumably relatively easily able to acquire goods direct from foreign markets, buying, for instance, a cabinet at Rouen for £3, which he sent to Susan (his wife-to-be) as a gift. Locally, Hayne’s Exeter purchases can be divided into three groups. First, bulk purchases of household objects: in 1636, he made large purchases from two widows, presumably selling off their most impressive furnishings following their husbands’ death. Hayne’s wife gave £5 in May, for instance, for a set of curtains and valence of blue serge with yellow lace and yellow worsted ‘French’, with matching chairs, stools, and a rug. This purchase provided the newly married couple with a complete set of bedroom furniture in French style, every object matching in colour, fabric, and trimmings. Such payments represent over 40 per cent of his domestic expenditure for 1636 and clearly constituted the majority of his household furniture and furnishings. They suggest an interesting
1 10s
1 £1 7 £9 5s 9d
Kitchen equipment
Security (locks, etc.)
10 £2 12s 11d
2 2s 5d
2 3s
2 7s 8d 1 1s 4d
2 5s 4d 1 £1 11s 6d
1635 7 £1 12s 6d 6 £7 3s 8d 3 £35 10s 1½d 10 £6 13s 3d 17 £4 1s 11d 4 £10 16s 2d 12 £9 15s 6d 3 15s 6d 21 £4 13s 11d 4 6s 2d 21 £2 3s 2d 108 £84 8s 9½d
1636
8 £9 6d 1 5s 1 16s 8d 1 6d 7 £1 6s 3d 33 £34 17s 6d
2 £2 6s 8d 1 1s 6d 1 £15 11s 2 10s 9d 7 9s 8d 2 £3 17s
1637
25 £6 9s 2.5d
13 £1 14s 10½d
1 1s 4 £2 17s 3d 2 7s 10d
4 4s 3d 1 £1 4s
1638
1 7s 1 10s 6d 6 8s 23 £16 2s
1 £3
1 £8 16s 6 17s 6d
6 £1 5s 1 8s
1639
35 £18 12s 8d
9 £4 19s 6d 3 £2 8s 2d
4 £2 3d 1 £1 2s 5 £3 7s 3d 7 £3 15s 2 6s 6d
4 14s
1640
25 £6 7s 9d 10 £10 8s 8d 4 £51 1s 6½d 19 £18 7s 11d 34 (6 14s 2d 15 £17 5s 1d 36 £33 3s 10d 6 £1 7s 48 £23 4s 4½d 9 £3 5s 4d 35 £4 17s 5d
TOTAL
Notes: In later years, Hayne’s accounting system became more complex, involving other volumes including a ‘household stuff book’. The majority of the furniture recorded here (the only extant book) from 1639 onwards is just passing through the accounts as he traded in objects left him by his father or bought to make a profit. Hayne’s accounts do not include expenditure for cleaning; presumably it was conducted in-house without need of the specialised starches and soaps that appear in Puckering’s accounts.
Source: John Hayne’s Account Book, DRO Z19/36/14
TOTAL
Lighting
Heating
4 £7 2s
1 9d
1634
Furniture
Furnishing (soft)
Bulk purchases of household objects Dining (inc. silverware and pewter) Fittings
Bedding
Alterations/ mending
Category
Table 1.2 John Hayne’s domestic purchases, 1634–40 (number of purchases and total spent).
Lifestyles and Lifespans 27
28 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson wholesale ‘taking on’ of domestic identity in a way that must have had a considerable visual impact as it changed at one time the entire appearance of a room and might be seen against Puckering’s established elite stores of goods, added to incrementally over generations. The latter did not buy in this way at all, suggesting that elite spending, although of equivalent or greater value, is more likely to have resulted in a multitemporal domestic environment. The second type of purchase is Hayne’s personal commissioning of items of furniture directly from the joiner. These include a drawing chest, a chair, shelving, and a table in the study, presumably made to his own specification. The final significant piece of furniture apparently intended for his own house whose purchase is recorded in the book is ‘a large Wainscot = Presse to hange = Gownes in’, purchased for £3 on 26 June 1639. Shortly before this payment, on 20 June, he gave 3s 6d to Mr Hoppin ‘for a Dutch lock and eye for my newe = Presse’. This indicates his simultaneous organisation of the object’s various elements, suggesting the timescales between ordering and taking delivery of such a large piece of furniture. These entries reveal a process of negotiation and discussion, followed by waiting. They are therefore slower—like the London purchases that are ordered in advance—but also closer to the processes of production. They most closely resemble the work Puckering has done by Lewis but more clearly open Hayne’s household aesthetic up to the market. Finally, Hayne’s smaller purchases represent occasional acquisitions to attend to immediate needs. Many of them are metal goods for the kitchen, as he set it up to his wife’s liking so that she was able to run it efficiently with her maid. To this end, he bought parcels of goods, often from named makers, through the summer months: for instance, from John Tucker a brass chafing dish, tinderbox, and mousetrap for 6s 4d.; from Thomas Macumber a pair of bellows, little dripping pan, iron candlestick, plate covers, grater, extinguishers, and pint cup for 5s 5d.23 The items are often of the same material as one another, and the occupation of their vendor is usually noted. In the later years of the accounts, groups of objects are less frequently purchased and rather different in their makeup: payments for a pair of feete for a trunke of Deale, 14d, a Saltboxe 15d, mending ye butter = house dore 10d, for mending ye lowest coope = runner 3s, setting a lock on a square boxe 2d, 2 shoulders of Deale to hang clokes in ye Press 4d combine maintenance with purchase, indicating that the craftsman came to mend and also sold Hayne new objects while present in the house or issued a bill that included both types of charge. Multiple purchases on a single shopping trip seem very much linked to the early years of householding, for those with sufficient income to invest in this way. We do
Lifestyles and Lifespans 29 not know whether Hayne, at this later point, had versions of such items that he was replacing, but the suggestion is that he was at least considerably expanding his stores of ‘dowry’ items as he became an independent householder and doing so in consultation with his wife, as a part of a shared domestic imperative. Hayne’s experience is, in comparison with other account bookkeepers of the earlier seventeenth century, recognisably one of a mercantile individual in a busy port town.24 Throughout his book and with increasing regularity over time, he changed up his goods, swapping them for newer or more fashionable alternatives. The majority of such trading up involved tableware: a ‘little newe pottmettle skillet’ was exchanged for a larger one; most of his daughter’s christening plate for newer versions and this included an extra 26s ‘paid Abraham (mr Bartlets man) for ye exchange of 2 old fashion bowls given my daughter Susanna for 2 of ye new fashion’ and numerous exchanges of pewter. In contrast, Puckering only made one such payment, of 8s 6d ‘for the exchange of 12 newe brasse candlesticks for as many old worn pewter ones of mine’ to the Warwickshire townsman George Tong. He did exchange other things, both consumables (tallow for candles) and more substantial objects (a cottage ‘and 3 litle pingles [closes] of mine’ for a close behind his house), so it is not the form of transaction that is peculiar but its application to household durables where old objects were replaced by more fashionable varieties of the same thing. Hayne’s obviously keen sense of changing fashion, in contrast, was linked to his substantial investment in the types of materials in which alterations of shape were rapid, such as pewter and brass tableware. Puckering owned far fewer of these things (his pewter and brass are almost exclusively confined to his kitchen, and his dining goods are silver) so he might be expected to alter his goods less frequently. But this is a clear distinction between their domestic aesthetic, their social standing, and the period in which they were active: as Hayne and the seventeenth century grew older together, the trading in of existing goods for more fashionable versions became more common. If the middling were both aesthetic and economic pace-setters from the late sixteenth century onwards, then their domestic updating might be expected to gather pace and spread outward from sources of new styles as the seventeenth century wore on into the eighteenth. For both men, the minutely recorded detail of this expenditure on household items, their repair and maintenance, shows that a considerable level of complexity experienced on a daily basis must have structured their experience of domestic life. There were different emphases in spending: between large single payments and smaller ones for parts of more substantial objects (hinges and fringes) and for upkeep and for major overhauls of whole rooms and attention paid to items within them; only Hayne invested in the type of tableware that could be updated with more
30 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson fashionable examples. Although Hayne was obviously more directly involved in his larger domestic purchases than Puckering, both men regularly discussed and wrote out the minutiae of domestic purchases.
Lasting Things Sir Thomas Puckering owned, like all men of his standing, objects that suggested the pedigree of their family—for instance ‘one longe Cushion of blacke ymbroydered gold stuffe wth armes on it, one payre of longe Cushions of purple velvett wth armes ymbroydered’. On the death of Hayne’s parents, we see goods with a similarly close relationship to family identity, through their decoration, moving within the more formalised discourse of testamentary provision—given a lasting significance by being written into the will: Phillippe Hayne leaves John’s two children ‘twoe silver spoones of them that have theire grandfathers marke upon them’.25 These items appear to signify in a rather different way to the often-altered tableware that comes through the accounts, and so, in this section, we consider the things that were meant to stay put, a particular category of domestic purchase of which the account books necessarily have less to say. This type of item was intended to last over generations, and its preservation into the present gives us the opportunity to explore its material qualities. We consider in detail a sample of bespoke items intended as permanent additions to the fabric or appurtenances of the home, with a particular focus on showy, conspicuous items inscribed with names and dates. The form of these objects—with customised decoration an intrinsic part of their material fabric—differs from the upholstered furniture and metalwares that Puckering and Hayne could readily alter or renew. Harris’s framework of polychronicity, the capacity of objects to collate different moments in time, is especially useful in approaching these ‘extraordinary’ acquisitions; these objects were viewed or used in the routines of daily life but also signalled an engagement with ideas of posterity and the eternal, with their establishment as heirlooms allowing them to act as vehicles of communication between past, present, and future. What follows examines the nature of fixtures and wares that were intended as permanent additions to the structure or contents of a household, to be passed on as part of the inherited ‘package’ of the property. In particular, we explore a tendency for such key investment items to incorporate dates, personal and familial identifiers such as initials and heraldry, biblical imagery, or a combination of these and how this convergence of object type and adornment makes explicit—and enhances— their polychronic quality. The so-called great rebuilding of middling-level housing stock that took place over the long seventeenth century involved a shift in thinking about the physical fabric of the house with an associated knock-on
Lifestyles and Lifespans 31 effect on ideas of material permanence.26 From the later sixteenth century onwards, fabric previously considered as moveable assets, such as wainscot and glazing, starts to be identified as an indissoluble part of the structure of the property, as ‘standards’ to be part of the inherited estate thereafter. This understanding of domestic fabric also extended to key items of furniture such as beds, cupboards, tables, and chairs, as represented by the 1613 will of Richard Smalbroke, prominent Birmingham citizen and builder of two lesser country houses in Yardley and Bordesley, which included a ‘schedule’ (list) of ‘goods and Chattells’ to be inherited along with his house. This specifies selected items of wooden furniture by room including in ‘the Parlour one Drawing Table boarde with the frame[,] one longe form[,] one livery Cupboard[,] one other Cupboard wch was my fathers’.27 Smalbroke’s ‘schedule’ forms a counterpart to inventory practice in listing the possessions that must be retained, rather than the goods that will be sold off, anticipating this division and dispersal. Such documents are part of a wider ‘culture of appraisal’, an awareness of the value and worth of material possessions in social as well as economic terms.28 The additional information that one of the cupboards had belonged to his father (not helpful for purposes of differentiating it from the other ‘livery’ cupboard) suggests that Smalbroke saw this object’s biography as an important aspect of its inheritable worth. Such stipulations about the tying of furniture to house reflect a shift in thinking from temporary to permanent domesticity; from the individual lifespan or stage of life to the next generation and posterity. Such actions and their textual form speak to the shift from renting to owning property and perhaps even suggest the movement from upper middling to gentry identity. This approach to certain items of furniture is sometimes embedded within their form, as an integral part of their design and decoration. The inclusion of names and dates carved into large items of furniture such as tables, chests, chairs, and cupboards was no doubt intended to mark significant rites of passage, most notably marriage as the founding institution at which a household comes into being. Examples include two elm chests in the V&A Museum—one with the name Elizabeth Lovell and the date 1640, likely her marriage chest—and another highly ornate chest inscribed with the initials IG in the centre of the front panel.29 This also contains an inscription around the base: ‘16. THIS: CHEST. WAS: MAD: IN: THE. YEARE: OF: OUR. 39’ continued around the sides ‘LORD: GOD. ANO: DO’. and ‘BY. JAMES. GRIFFIN’.30 Another chest now at Warwick Castle contains a lengthy inscription recording the marriage of Izaak Walton to Rebecca Floud in 1626, along with a scene of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (Figure 1.1). Adam and Eve are also depicted on the back panel of a carved armchair along with the date 1634 and the initials WC.31 Such furniture with dates, initials, and inscriptions could well have been acquired at the point of marriage, but the common description of the function of such items within museum
32 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson
Figure 1.1 Carved oak chest, with a scene of Adam and Eve and an inscription commemorating the marriage of Izaak Walton and Rachel Floud in 1626 (now at Warwick Castle).
literature as straightforwardly ‘commemorative’ focuses on that synchronic dimension rather than the dynamic, polychronic quality of their expected continued presence within the house over generations. The nature of domestic decoration was also changing over this same period. The previously ubiquitous painted cloth listed in most middlingstatus houses in the mid- to late 1500s declined sharply in the last decade of the century, while fixed surface decoration such as wall painting and plasterwork became increasingly common in rural and urban properties in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Such decoration often accompanied substantial structural alterations to existing buildings including the creation of new chimneys and upper chambers. This sort of unusual, once-in-a-generation, intervention in the physical form of houses—the substantial remodelling or extension of existing built fabric—needs to be considered alongside the patterns of regular and occasional expenditure discussed previously; it is in the interplay of long-term and short-term investment that we can see most plainly how the overlapping temporalities of domestic life were understood and expressed. Robert Furse of Moorshead in Devon understood this sort of work to his house as part of his duty in consolidating and extending his inheritance. His memoirs, written in 1593, addressed ‘to all his Sequelle’, described in detail substantial alterations and additions, including:
Lifestyles and Lifespans 33 he made the hall larger by all moste the iii parte and increased one mor light to the same by one wyndowe . . . he made all the chambers over the same[,] he made the porch and enterye and syled [sealed— ceiled over] the hall and glaste all the wyndoes. He goes on to detail how he improved and increased the implements and furnishings of his house ‘in mycke better valye than he reseved the same’.32 Investment in chimneys involved a radical, permanent reorganisation of living space in middling homes, and deep chimneybreasts created a prominent new feature for decorative display, elaborated with mantelpieces, overmantels, and hearth equipment. Ornament in and around the hearth again focused on displays of personal and familial identity in the form of initials or armorials in gentry houses and biblical imagery. Such decoration therefore identified the founder responsible for this significant intervention in the built fabric of the property, marking their place in the history of the building in much the same way that Furse described his architectural improvements in terms of consolidating, enlarging, and increasing his inheritance. Meanwhile, the most common biblical subjects included Adam and Eve and the Sacrifice of Isaac, both of which spoke to the concept of progeny as well as piety, while associating the owners with the origins of time as well as Christian faith as described in the book of Genesis. This combination of meanings is evident in the decoration of iron firebacks as a new accessory to the fireplace intended not only to reflect heat back into the house but also to reflect the signification of hearth as synonymous with the consolidation of a household. Firebacks provide a particularly pertinent example of investment in permanent items for the household as they functioned precisely to endure fire and preserve the hearth area from damage. The permanence of their iron materials was recognised by the parallel production of graveslabs by the foundries of the Weald.33 The fireback illustrated in Figure 1.2 represents a particular trend in fireback decoration involving the recording of dates and initials, the point at which the item entered the house, along with its original owners. It is dated 1660 and includes the triad of initials IPA repeated twice, this triangular arrangement referring to a married couple.34 A similar item was purchased by Giles Moore, Rector of Horsted Keynes in Sussex, who recorded on 20 November 1657: ‘a plate cast for my kitchen chimney . . . marked G.M.S’. (his and his wife Susan’s initials).35 The fireback was not to mark the occasion of their marriage but rather their ongoing union as they settled into their new home (Moore had been appointed rector in the previous year). It is too simplistic to see such objects as straightforwardly commemorative in function—marking a specific event and therefore of the past and passive—rather, the information embedded within their manufacture records a state of being, a marital union that will continue to have relevance and resonance through time.
34 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson
Figure 1.2 Cast-iron fireback, with initials IPA and the date 1660. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, No: 24.119.
Another change in the materials of domestic life associated with the seventeenth century is the development of the native ceramic industry and a source of objects that could be made to comment on their conjunction of materials, meanings, and temporalities. Metropolitan slipware produced in the first half of the seventeenth century is characterised by pious mottos encouraging reflection on mortality. A red earthenware jug of the mid-seventeenth century proclaims ‘FOR EARTH I AM’, and this sentiment is echoed in a white earthenware plate in the Museum of London, ‘You & I are Earth’ with the date 1661.36 These tablewares are not primarily intended as utilitarian pieces, rather, they make a sophisticated comment on the associations between provisioning the house with inheritable items and the inherent materiality of their form, which will, like human bodies, be returned to the earth ultimately. Reminders of death on everyday things collapsed the quotidian and the eternal, asserting the essential humility of worldly stuff in the wider scheme of things. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, these inheritance objects embodied a trust in their long-term efficacy to outlive their owners and inform the spiritual
Lifestyles and Lifespans 35 lives of future generations. Such ‘speaking pots’ make explicit their polychronic quality and thereby differentiate these objects from the kinds of tablewares destined to be traded up for more prestigious or fashionable versions, as discussed earlier.37 The inclusion of biblical images within such items introduces yet another semantic layer. A tin-glazed charger in the V&A has at the centre a scene of Adam and Eve’s temptation/fall along with the initials TTM and the date 1635 (Figure 1.3).38 A later charger with the same subject made by Thomas Toft includes his name and the date 1674.39 Like the Griffin chest mentioned earlier, this object celebrates and immortalises its maker rather than its owner, adding a sense of pride in new forms of craftsmanship. It may be mistaken to see the acquisition of such fashionable, novel ceramic items in the seventeenth century simply as part of the onward march of consumerism and modernity. Their bespoke designs— containing an image of the far-distant biblical past in dialogue with the synchronic moment suggested by the date and personal identifiers—were created with an eye to future inheritance and shaping of familial memory. Such items evoke daily practices of dining while simultaneously reaching back to ancient times and looking forward, thus participating actively in the inherent multi-temporality of the domestic household. As we have discussed, testators sometimes went into considerable detail about the previous ownership of goods bequeathed in wills. Modifications made to a final object considered here can be understood as a material manifestation of autobiographical life-writing—a genre that facilitated reflection on events and relationships. An earthenware cup in the V&A dating from c.1600 was later embellished, around 1658, with a raised silver mount engraved with an inscription in Latin, which translates as: This fragile cup was bought by me in AD 1618 and soon after given to my maternal great-uncle Nicholas Miller Esquire, who, concluding his last day in the year 1621 at the age of 85, bequeathed it to me together with other things worthy of note. Nicholas Miller June 12 An[no] 1658 at the age of 65.40 The inscription resembles some testamentary phraseology relating to heirlooms, but in making a permanent change to the form and semiotic capacity of the cup, Nicholas Miller expressed his personal investment in this item, elaborating the relationship between its biography and his own. This kind of material testimony suggests an early modern attachment to certain household objects as tangible, lasting embodiments of familial ties and personal histories, and, as with investment in church memorials and memorial portraits, such ‘speaking objects’ expressed a hope for remembrance within future generations.41
36 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson
Figure 1.3 Tin-glazed earthenware dish, with scene of Adam and Eve, initials TTM, and the date 1635. Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, London, No: C.26–1931. © The Victoria and Albert Museum.
Lifestyles and Lifespans 37
Conclusions: Attending to the Lifespans of Domestic Things Daily life revolves around quotidian domestic routines—the servicing of essential human needs and relationships. But while domestic practices take place in the moment and are fleeting, the spaces and material culture that facilitate them are embedded within—and refer to—longer cycles of time. Sourcing household provisions requires an understanding of the journeys of local—and increasingly global—products while investments in goods are informed by an appreciation of the timescales and additional resources involved in levels of maintenance, repair, and replacement. We have argued that this multi-temporal quality of everyday domestic life is especially evident in documentary and material sources pertaining to the seventeenth-century household in England. This is not to argue that a sensitivity to the polychronic quality of domestic things was unique to this period. There was, however, over the course of the seventeenth century, an expansion in the kinds of householders who needed to think in these overlapping dimensions. There was also an expansion in the range of fixtures, furnishings, and wares available to these householders that might explicitly or implicitly encourage reflection on issues of ephemerality, durability, and permanence. The unprecedented level of intervention in the physical form of houses, the development of new designs and novel goods and materials of manufacture associated with this period, does suggest that during the seventeenth century there was a heightened awareness of—and engagement with— how the lives of things intersected with the lives of people. Understanding the forces and strategies at play for those wealthier seventeenth-century householders able to invest in their domestic environment beyond the necessaries of the moment therefore provides a richer context for similar sensitivities and behaviours by the middling and gentry in the eighteenth century. This chapter, then, has emphasised the need to consider the human– object relationships of daily domestic life within a richer temporal context. We have highlighted the complex dynamic, even tension, between imperatives to acquire, replace, renew, and retain certain kinds of fixtures and furnishings according to degrees of social status and stage in the life cycle. It has been possible to establish how the routines of purchase and domestic renewal impacted the daily lives of the households involved, how such routines shaped their sense of their own status as households and the uniqueness of their ‘material identities’ within their communities, and how different but physically contingent temporalities shaped the sense of daily life in the household. We have pointed towards parallel patterns of infrequent investment in traditional and highly durable goods, alongside an interest in novelty, newness, and the more regular ‘trading in’ of items for more fashionable models, driven partly by the
38 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson growth of native industries and middling-sort patronage and partly by changing attitudes towards the past and future. But this is not the only temporal development in the seventeenth-century house. We have also identified the increasing importance for some groups of achieving a more enduring domestic environment, set up during their own lifetimes but intended for the maintenance or increase of social status for their heirs. Here, marking of objects in ways that identify individuals and/or particular moments of entry into the household through initials and dates is key to preparations for the future, particularly the matter of differentiating between goods bound for dispersal and those intended as inheritance items. The coexistence of these impulses and their relationship to different places, geographically and socially, indicates the particularly complex temporalities embedded within daily life and domestic routines at the start of the long eighteenth century.
Notes 1. Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 2. Colin Platt, The Great Re-buildings of Tudor and Stuart England: Revolutions in Architectural Taste (Abingdon: Routledge, 1994). 3. Woolf, Social Circulation. 4. Jonathan Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare (Bristol: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 4. 5. The interest in substantial fixtures, furniture, and tablewares as inheritance items draws from Tara Hamling, ‘An Heirloom to this House Forever: Monumental Fixtures and Furnishings in the English Domestic Interior, c.1560— c.1660’, in The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England, ed. Thomas Rist and Andrew Gordon (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) and is much indebted to new arguments about the polychronic quality of dated domestic objects in Sophie Cope, “Making Time Material: Dated Objects in Seventeenth Century England” (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2018). 6. For further biographical details, see N. G. Jones, ‘Puckering, Sir John’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed March 5, 2020, www.oxforddnb. com; Andrew Thrush, History of Parliament, accessed March 5, 2020, www. historyofparliamentonline.org/; Victoria County History, Warwick, accessed March 5, 2020, www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/, passim. 7. Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 28, 26, 21, 24. 8. Mark Merry and Catherine Richardson (eds), The Household Account Book of Sir Thomas Puckering of Warwick, 1620: Living in the Midlands and London (Stratford-upon-Avon: Dugdale Society, 2012), 246. 9. MacCaffrey, Exeter 1540–1640 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 265; for the circumstances of his father’s parliamentary election in 1626, George Yerby and Paul Hunneyball, ‘John Hayne’, www.historyof parliamentonline.org/volume/1604-1629/member/hayne-john-1639 10. Merry and Richardson, Household Account Book, 158. 11. Ibid., 110. 12. Ibid., 106. 13. Ibid., 94, 110.
Lifestyles and Lifespans 39 4. Ibid., 179, 182. 1 15. For further information on the building and gardening projects undertaken at The Priory this year, see Merry and Richardson, Household Account Book, 74–79. 16. Merry and Richardson, Household Account Book, 97. 17. Ibid., 109. 18. Ibid., 159. Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Stoup’, 2. Drinking vessel, cup, flagon or tankard, accessed April 3, 2020, www.oed.com. 19. Merry and Richardson, Household Account Book, 160. 20. DRO Z19/36/14, f.38. 21. Robert Tittler’s Database of ‘Early Modern British Painters, c. 1500–1640’ (https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/980096/) shows a ‘Brooke’ who was appointed deputy herald to the Clarenceux King of Arms for Devon and Somerset in 1594 (admitted freeman of Exeter c.1603/04 and whose will was proved in 1617), whose apprentice, Richard Hornabrooke (q.v.), was made a freeman of Exeter in 1623. 22. For Worcester’s courier see Alan Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1973), 59, 88. 23. DRO Z19/36/14 ff. 25v, 35v. 24. See, for comparison, the expenditure of Thomas Cocks in Canterbury, explored in Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), esp. 167–174. 25. TNA PCC PROB 11.183.181, 1640. 26. W.G. Hoskins coined the term ‘great rebuilding’ in ‘The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640’, Past and Present 4 (1953): 44–59, 44. The subsequent historiography is substantial with some debate over the extent to which this constituted a ‘revolution’ in architecture and the differing extent and pace of change according to region. That there was a general pattern of substantial investment in domestic housing over the sixteenth and seventeenth century is not in question. For sustained discussion of this matter see Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England and Matthew Johnson, English Houses 1300–1800: Vernacular Architecture, Social Life (London: Routledge, 2010), see esp., 88–89. 27. Will of Richard Smalbroke, TNA PCC PROB 11.122.437, 1613. 28. Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 29. Museum nos. W.31–1926 (on loan to Oakwell Hall, West Yorkshire) and W.30:2–1913. 30. Museum no: W.30:2–1913: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O107431/chest/ 31. Marhamchurch Antiques website: www.marhamchurchantiques.com/ antique/adam-and-eve-joined-oak-great/ 32. Anita Travers, ed., Robert Furse: A Devon Family Memoir of 1593, Devon and Cornwall Record Society New Series, vol. 53 (Exeter, 2012), 72–73. 33. Jeremy Hodgkinson, British Cast-Iron Firebacks of the 16th to Mid 18th Centuries (Crawley: Hodgersbooks, 2010). 34. Two early firebacks dated 1582 each include an inscription making the connection with marriage explicit. One reads, ‘Thomas Unstead Isifild And Dinis His Wif Ano Domino 1582’, whilst another is inscribed ‘Thes Is For James Hide And Ion His Wif 1582’; Hodgkinson, British Cast Iron Fireplaces, plates 127 and 128. Examples from the seventeenth century adopt the triad of initials as a shorthand for these longer statements of union and joint ownership. 35. Ruth Bird, ed., The Journal of Giles Moore (Sussex Record Society, 1971), 24.
40 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson 36. Fitzwilliam Museum inventory number: 2476783; Museum of London object ID: A14639. 37. ‘Speaking pots’ is a description used by Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Reaktion Books, 2001). 38. Museum no. C.26–1931. 39. At Temple Newsam, Leeds. 40. V&A Museum No: LOAN:GILBERT.583–2008. Image available at: http:// collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O156535/jug-unknown/ 41. Also discussed in Tara Hamling, ‘Household Objects’, in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (New York: Routledge, 2016), III.15.
2 ‘A Little Paradise’ The Urban and Rural Homes of a Manchester Manufacturer Thomas McGrath
In the summer of 1798, Hannah Greg wrote to a friend that I look forward to living less in this town, which of late has become almost insupportable to me—as Mr. G seems to intend seriously building 3 or 4 rooms in the country this year—which will enable me to keep my family together about me, at least all summer.1 These words indicate how she causally associated the urbanisation and industrialisation of Manchester to changes in her personal and domestic circumstances. The recipient of her letter was a trusted family friend, which carries a sense of candour to her thoughts. She had lived in the town for the best part of a decade before penning her letter, which suggests how culminating shifts in this environment were gradually curtailing her ability to fully realise the domestic ideals of the day. Hannah Greg’s welcoming of her husband’s future building plans are insightful and illustrate the significance of urban and rural living on behaviour and social ideals. Seminal texts by Mary B. Rose, David Sekers and Peter Spencer largely focus on the Gregs’ business empire or on the extensively detailed individual biographies of Samuel and Hannah themselves.2 Drawing upon these accounts has proved invaluable in the formulation of this chapter. The methodological approach used here follows the format adopted by Christine Casey, Stephen Hague, Jane Hamlett, Mark Rothery, Jon Stobart and Amanda Vickery in their studies relating to spatiality and domestic routines.3 The analysis draws on a range of personal papers of the Greg family—including diaries, letters and household accounts—to reveal a personal and domestic narrative that stands in contrast with the business perspectives offered in previous studies. In particular, the personal writings of Hannah Greg provide an additional dimension to our understanding of the gendered nature of social-spatial interactions within the home. Her personal accounts provide key insights into the role played by a merchant–manufacturer’s wife and how she was able to use her domestic space to reflect her identity, as both mistress of the household and hostess to a wide circle of family, friends and business acquaintances.
42 Thomas McGrath A comparative examination of the family’s urban King Street residence and the rural Quarry Bank dwelling exposes how the duality of two domestic residences communicated broader issues beyond wealth and status. A comparison of the layout of each property highlights the constrained and unrestrained nature of housebuilding within the urban and rural topographies of the period. As John Crowley has observed, comfort, particularly in rural homes, could be vastly different in both style and ideology from homes within the urban environment, and this is evident within the Gregs’ homes.4 The family’s utilisation of both homes and their notions of fashion, taste and comfort in each abode clearly show an intention to communicate their personal ideologies and the shifting nature of these between rural and urban settings. Hannah’s writings are used throughout this chapter to illustrate the daily routines and household practices of the Gregs and their household. A thematic structure is used, first to consider what the architectural form of the Gregs’ homes on King Street and at Quarry Bank reveals about the appearance of the home within urban and rural topographies. The situation of the domestic properties, particularly in relation to places of business, was an important consideration for the merchant and manufacturer, and the chapter explores the consequences of such a domestic arrangement for the wider household. Building on this, the chapter also considers how these domestic spaces were used day-to-day and what this was able to communicate about respectability and morality, while offering insights into the everyday life of a Manchester manufacturer and his family.
35 King Street: A Constrained Townhouse The family history of both Samuel and Hannah Greg clearly indicates that they were well placed to succeed in terms of business and in their social lives. Hannah was the daughter of Adam Lightbody, a prominent merchant and member of the Unitarian community in Liverpool. Samuel’s father, Thomas Greg, was a shipowner with transatlantic trade links, and he owned land in North America and the West Indies.5 A family decision made in 1766 was key to Samuel’s future success. Samuel was sent from his birthplace in Belfast to live with his maternal uncles, Robert and Nathaniel Hyde, in Manchester. The Hydes’ home was located on King Street, which was first laid out in the mid-1730s to the south of the Manchester Exchange, and it eventually became one of Manchester’s most prominent residential streets. It is clear Robert and Nathaniel Hyde had lived at 35 King Street since 1765, but conveyance documents relating to the property suggest the house was built and occupied by the brothers from 1763.6 A series of family failings and events opened opportunities to Samuel, and he took advantage of these. Robert Hyde was twice married but had no children.7 His brother, Nathaniel, married Margaret Markland in 1777. The couple had several children, but their two eldest sons died in
‘A Little Paradise’ 43 infancy, leaving Nathaniel with only female heirs at the time of his brother’s death in January 1783.8 Upon the death of Robert Hyde, Nathaniel, who ‘was subject to long drunken bouts for days together’, relinquished his stocks and shares in Hyde and Company.9 This decision left Samuel, who had been made a partner in the company in 1780, in sole control of the business.10 Robert Hyde also left a legacy of £10,000 to his nephew, which enabled Samuel to establish his cotton-spinning mill alongside the River Bollin at Quarry Bank, Cheshire in 1784.11 Samuel continued to reside in the house at 35 King Street, which he eventually purchased outright from his cousin, John Hyde.12 The topography of King Street was varied given the piecemeal construction of properties on the street across several decades. 35 King Street, located on the southern side, was constrained by the existing streetscape, unlike earlier properties built in the late 1730s and early 1740s, which were unrestrained in their size and scale. These houses of wealthy merchants and manufacturers were depicted on cartographic records alongside other key buildings in Manchester as visible symbols of the progression of the town.13 In contrast, the architecture of 35 King Street was symbolic of practical and economical restraint. The streetfacing façade of the property was relatively plain, with the exception of decorative architraves around the first- and second-floor windows of the central bay. The Hydes and the Gregs were comfortable with the appearance of their home, and neither attempted to alter the façade to emulate neighbouring properties. This does not suggest the families were not invested in the townhouse. The inclusion of two water closets within the home by 1826 was a domestic convenience absent from other mercantile properties in Manchester.14 The carefully located water closets, one on the ground floor adjacent to the butler’s pantry and the store closet (and presumably for the use of servants) and the other on the first floor for the use of the family, accommodated to the needs of the entire household (Figure 2.1). The internal layout of the townhouse reflected the compromises of a flourishing urban town in the eighteenth century. Due to the proximity of neighbours on either side, the house, which was five bays wide with three storeys over cellars, conformed to a double-pile plan with fenestration restricted to the front and rear of the property.15 Within the context of the urban environment, street-fronting houses blurred the boundaries between the indoors and outdoors. On at least one occasion in January 1805, this close proximity to the outside world allowed Hannah to break from societal norms and extend her domestic hospitality to the poor: Yesterday a poore [sic] woman fell in a fit on our steps and in less than two hours after I took her into the house expired almost in my arms—an affecting circumstance before the eyes of my children and servants.16
44 Thomas McGrath
Figure 2.1 A plan of the ground floor of 35 King Street as it appeared in July 1826. Source: ©Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Photograph: Ardon Bar Hama.
‘A Little Paradise’ 45 The purpose of street-facing rooms within the home was to incorporate an element of display, although 35 King Street was built on a half-cellar and therefore slightly elevated from street level, which offered some privacy to the occupants. Nonetheless, daily activities taking place in these prominent spaces, such as the dining room or first-floor drawing room, along with the materiality of the home, such as the Gregs’ tasteful satinwood furniture, would have been somewhat visible to pedestrians.17 Upon her arrival in Manchester, Hannah faced the difficulty of creating a family home from a bachelor’s residence. Her adaptations of the existing spaces were evident in the family’s multifunctional use of the groundfloor breakfast parlour. The versatility of the room extended beyond the role its title conveyed, and it appears to have been a favoured, intimate and informal space used regularly by the family. For example, on Sunday afternoons Hannah used the space as a classroom where she would homeschool her young children before they began their more formal education.18 The struggles Hannah faced to mould her routines around the constrained townhouse would continue to dominate daily life at King Street in the early years of her marriage, with consequences for the entire household.
Entertaining at King Street Samuel’s eventual purchase of the property in King Street later proved to be a lucrative decision. During this period, business and socialisation were inextricably linked, and the centralised location of his King Street home was convenient for entertaining Manchester’s social and cultural elites. Late eighteenth-century hosting invariably involved the provision of food for invited guests, and, in line with common practice, the dining room of the Gregs’ townhouse became a focal point of the weekly ritual of entertaining family, friends and business acquaintances.19 For example, Samuel’s fellow members of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society would occasionally retire from their meetings to have supper at the Gregs’ home.20 The fusion of the private and public spheres also held limited opportunities to broaden the restricted horizons of some women. Whereas the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society did not permit female membership, Hannah’s close friendship with two senior members of the society, Dr Thomas Percival and Dr Charles White, allowed her to join in the mealtime discussions with members in the privacy of the domestic setting.21 It is clear that Hannah welcomed such occasions, although her diary entries confirm that she was less enthusiastic about her expected role during more formal entertaining. This was particularly evident during her early period as a wife and as a new arrival in Manchester.22 Hannah was reliant on her network of friends and family members, which largely consisted of the wives and daughters of other merchants and
46 Thomas McGrath manufacturers, to guide her on the social customs of the town. Her diary reveals she found welcome support from contemporaries her own age, such as Miss Kennedy, who was able to advise on how to entertain Samuel’s all-male acquaintances: Mr G. received Company. Miss K. telling us how to follow the general custom—a long table in the Dining Room—covered with cold Meats, Turkey &c. a Great Bowl of Milk Punch &c. the Plumb Cake and Chocolate on a side—all very new to me—the room full of Gentlemen all morning.23 Growing up in an entirely female household, this would have been an unfamiliar form of entertaining for Hannah, yet her diary entry infers she was eager to support her husband and fulfil her position as mistress of the household. However, Hannah had not expected an indifferent relationship with her new family members, which would ultimately challenge her emotional state and her skills as a hostess. She had expected her new female family members would ‘support me in my new and arduous situation’; instead, she found Samuel’s aunt Mrs Margaret Hyde ‘cold to him [Samuel] and anyone belonging to him’.24 These feelings of alienation permeated Hannah’s thoughts and emotions, which she conveyed, somewhat unwittingly, into her private and public spheres. She recorded in her diary that Samuel himself was ‘displeased at finding me in tears over a letter from home’, and she was chastised by an acquaintance, Mrs Hamilton, who stated: ‘I think you have no joy with us for you are always wishing to be somewhere else’.25 Hannah’s reference to Liverpool as ‘home’ indicates that she did not feel ‘at home’ in Manchester, and the frequent visits paid by Nathaniel and Margaret Hyde to their former home on King Street also did little to alleviate Hannah’s anxieties: Mrs Entwistle (Mr G’s own Cousin) the Hydes and a family party dined at our house—how much I lamented and repented my own folly in not having invited Miss Margaret Greg to remain in England— whose presence would save me so many mortifications, private and public. Unable to promote conversation from total ignorance of any current subject and a great fear of introducing anything that might displease (general or literary subjects never being referred to in most of the parties I have been in) the day passed heavily tho’ under such a consciousness on my part of the necessity of giving satisfaction as to oppress me with the deepest and most cruel anxiety.26 The somewhat apathetic attitude of the older generation of women towards Hannah’s situation, particularly compared with the willingness of friends such as Miss Kennedy, would suggest they expected Hannah to
‘A Little Paradise’ 47 overcome any adverse domestic situations and settle into her new position by using her own resolve. Hannah eventually wrote to her older sister, Elizabeth Hodgson, asking for recommendations concerning domestic advice literature. Elizabeth’s response, which recommended Mrs Cole’s book over Mrs Raffald’s, infers that at one time she too had been in need of such publications, as indeed had many women: I am sorry that you should have wanted Mrs Raffald—I luckily had Mrs Cole which I think a superior Compilation, & send it to you by the Coach, as Mrs Raffald is packed up with the other books. . . . What a change diversity of situation makes? That a Cookery Book should be the only one you should wish for—be not ashamed my dear sister, nothing discriminated more justly the excellence of the understanding than adapting judiciously the studies & habits to the differing changes which await you.27 Elizabeth’s response also made light of Hannah’s change in daily concerns, perhaps in an attempt to put her sister at ease. This is a revealing insight into the social expectations of a married woman in the eighteenth century, particularly a woman who held status. Hannah’s previous intellectual interests were superseded by domestic concerns, which her daughter later suggested were enforced by the ‘surveillance of her husband and aunts, so strict and formal about all the conventionalisms of society’.28
Household Tensions Many disruptions to the daily routines within King Street were caused by household tensions between mistress and servants. Hannah was competent and experienced in the running of her mother’s small household. In a letter written to Samuel before her marriage, Hannah displayed clear notions of her place in society and her expected role: Whenever you can spare the maid from Wilmslow . . . I would likewise employ her in doing many little things too insignificant to send out of the house to be done but to which I am too much engaged to do myself.29 However, entering a new, larger household that had previously been a bachelor’s environment seems to have blurred class and gender roles between master, mistress and their servants, and this was likely the basis of tensions within the home. The ideal inferred in the works of Mrs Cole and Mrs Raffald denoted that the new mistress entered the house as the figure in charge of the domestic domain, but the reality of Hannah’s situation meant the ideal was difficult to uphold, given the uneasy balance
48 Thomas McGrath of power created by her arrival. On her very first morning at King Street, Hannah recorded in her diary that she was reproached by a maid: The Chambermaid gave me warning saying that she thought there were servants enough in the house without my bringing in more, (meaning my Maid who came with me)—I ought to have allowed her to lessen the number, but knowing she had lived there several years, dared not till I had spoken to her Master, who said he should be sorry to lose her and I had better keep good servants &c. My sister P’s earnest advice then came to my remembrance and sunk deep into my heart viz: before I married not only to have the servants dismissed but the very house changed in which their Master had so long lived a Bachelor.30 Hannah turned to her diary to record other events within the household and the difficulties for all concerned. Her troubles also lay with the male servants. Recorded instances included the footman refusing to go behind the carriage until ordered to do so by Samuel and the groom who was dismissed for refusing to bring coal at Hannah’s request.31 Samuel appears to have also found himself in a difficult position with the disobedience directed at his wife. The dismissal of the groom implies that Samuel was attentive to the situation and that he was keen to support his wife’s position within the household. Despite this, his support of the chambermaid and the footman, whom Hannah wished had also been dismissed ‘for repeated insolence’ highlights tensions between the couple.32 Samuel’s expression of concern that Hannah had ‘better keep good servants’ reflected his fondness for those servants who had been loyal to him, particularly his female staff, who likely managed all his household concerns when he lived as a bachelor.33 As highlighted by Amanda Vickery, the dependence of the master and mistress upon their servants prevented them from making swift, uncalculated decisions that could affect the management of the household.34 This was particularly important for those households, such as the Gregs’, located in or near manufacturing towns, where their former servants could easily find other sources of employment in the textile industries. The frequent turnover of lower-status servants was a common occurrence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and this continual cycle of hiring, replacing and training servants did little to ‘liberate their mistress from the pressing demands of day-to-day supervision’.35 When writing to Hannah in 1801, William Rathbone IV empathised with her situation: ‘As I well know how much of comfort depends on good servants. I can by feeling enter into all your anxieties, and shall be truly glad if those you have now in prospect prove all you can wish’.36 Nonetheless, Rathbone’s sympathetic tone also alludes to a persistent uneasy domestic atmosphere at King Street. In August 1802, the positions of a coachman
‘A Little Paradise’ 49 and a cook at 35 King Street were advertised in the Manchester Mercury.37 Several months later, in April 1803, the cook’s position was again advertised, alongside a role for a kitchen maid.38 The despondencies and difficulties felt by Hannah Greg whenever the status quo of power and position in the household was challenged was not uncommon. For instance, the diaries and pocketbooks belonging to Elizabeth Shackleton, mistress of Alkincoats Hall in Colne, Lancashire, also document the occasional verbal rebuke from her female servants.39 Shackleton deemed one servant to have ‘vilest, most brutish tongue’.40 The recording of these incidents in the personal diaries of Shackleton and Greg reveals their compromised positions of power. They were simultaneously independent of and yet dependent upon their servants, and it is likely their personal writings were their only true expression of their feelings in order to preserve the maintenance of their households.
Finding Paradise: Situating the Rural Home Within a decade of moving to Manchester, Hannah’s letters and diaries frequently recorded her displeasure with urban life and her lamentations over ‘the constant rain, constrain and confinement &c. of Manchester’.41 The topography of the town and perils of urban life, alongside their growing family and domestic stress, culminated in straining her physical and mental health and prompted Hannah to seek a rural retreat away from Manchester for her family: I am enclosed in a busy, noisy town amidst employments so pressing and unmitigated that my nerves & my strength had nearly sunk under them . . . to live in a sweet retirement with a congenial mind seems to me a paradise that may enable one to hear anything—I look forward to living less in this town, which of late has become almost insupportable to me.42 The location of their country home, at Quarry Bank, some twelve miles from Manchester, is revealing of the patriarchal influences of Samuel over his family (Figure 2.2). Within weeks of their marriage, Samuel and Hannah visited Samuel’s mill at Quarry Bank, and Hannah quickly became enamoured with the location and wrote in her diary: ‘The romantic beauty of Q.B. delighted me and the possibility of occasionally escaping from Manchester to such a place renewed my hopes, vivacity and sanguine disposition’.43 Initially, when spending time there, they rented Oak Farmhouse in the hamlet of Styal, a short walk away from the mill. Nevertheless, as the dynamics of family life changed, with twelve children surviving to adulthood, the working farm no longer proved conducive to their needs, and, from 1798, construction began on their own house.
50 Thomas McGrath
Figure 2.2 Quarry Bank House and mill as viewed from the gardens. Source: Thomas McGrath (2018).
The construction of the property just metres from the cotton mill was reflective of Samuel’s desire to amalgamate his domestic and business spheres. This arrangement of domestic and industrial premises was familiar to Samuel. The substantial outdoor space at the rear of 35 King Street was cluttered with service buildings and a four-storied warehouse and office. The warehouse and office were erected by the Hydes, who had no need for a pleasure garden at King Street, as they had built a country home, Ardwick Hall, in the 1770s and retained King Street as a townhouse.44 Samuel continued to use the warehouse and office, as the carefully chosen location of these buildings allowed the merchant–manufacturer tighter control over the security of his stock from the comfort of his own home. This arrangement of business or industrial premises with domestic residences was not unusual in Manchester or other towns in the
‘A Little Paradise’ 51 north of England, as has been identified in Jane Longmore’s research on eighteenth-century Liverpool.45 Samuel’s decision to replicate this arrangement at Quarry Bank was not uncommon among the patriarchal figures of first-generation family businesses. As identified by Margaret Dupree, the situation reflected the origins of these industries as family businesses, hence the desire of some men to remain physically close to their business to control day-to-day operations.46 This close proximity allowed them to maintain their longpractised daily routine within the business, although the lack of separation could lead to tensions between older and younger generations within the family business, as it would with the Gregs at Quarry Bank Mill in the 1820s.47 The choice to establish better the status of the family was signified by the decision to take a home in the country, yet, whether by accident or design, this move also accommodated the shifting needs of his family. An eight-acre garden was cultivated at Quarry Bank on the banks of the River Bollin; the space flourished with specimens of myrtle, primula and rhododendron.48 The grand outdoor display simultaneously satisfied the long-craved recreational space by Hannah and her children, while also serving the practical purpose of acting as a physical barrier between the house and the mill.49 William Rathbone IV referred to Quarry Bank as a ‘little paradise’.50 John James Audubon, the American naturalist and painter, described it as ‘a most enchanting spot . . . the Grounds truly Pi[c]turesque and Improved as much as improvements can be’.51 However, unlike other visitors, William Ewart Gladstone acknowledged the inconvenient truth about the compromised location of Quarry Bank House: They have a very pretty place at Quarry Bank, the house on a small scale. Were it not for the noise and the smell of a cotton factory, the residence would appear an extremely pleasant one.52 Gladstone’s comments reveal that the Gregs’ domestic ideal was perhaps somewhat romanticised by their other guests. The situation of Quarry Bank House adjacent to the mill was a physical testament of the family’s origins in trade and industry, and the reluctance of Samuel to completely divorce himself from his business exposes the transitional status of some merchant– manufacturers in the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The rapid accumulation of wealth gained through trade and industry presented an opportunity to adopt aspects of the country lifestyle of the elite classes—a point to which we return later. Nevertheless, unlike a gentleman whose income was derived from the land, the merchant–manufacturer had the uneasy balance of maintaining his presence in the town, where his business was conducted. This made it necessary for some men to retain their urban dwellings, particularly for those like Samuel who continued to make routine visits to Manchester each Tuesday after 1815, when the family permanently moved to Quarry Bank.53
52 Thomas McGrath
Creating a Home: The Construction of Quarry Bank House The construction of their own home at Quarry Bank enabled the Gregs to realise their domestic needs and adapt their home around them. Originally, Quarry Bank House was constructed on an extremely small scale, comprising only three or four rooms in accordance with the occasional leisure time the family spent there, namely weekends throughout the year and more extended periods across the summer months, December and January.54 The Gregs were therefore initially satisfied dividing their time between their urban and rural homes, with the former still taking precedence as the main residential location. However, the gradual piecemeal construction projects to enlarge the house, which were drawn out across two decades, were reflective of the changing nature of the family’s domestic habits. The slow, organic growth of Quarry Bank House was demonstrative of the economical restraint exercised by Samuel. It is possible that elements of the construction process were partly funded by the legacy left to Hannah upon her mother’s death in 1801, and it is likely that Samuel waited to make the final structural changes to the house in 1814–15, when the uncertainty of the Napoleonic wars were over and the cost of building materials became cheaper and stabilised.55 The detailed accounts and invoices retained by Samuel for 1814 and 1815 highlight both his careful consideration of expenses and also the length of time the final construction process took. For example, the plasterer John Wyatt and his men spent 107 days working at the house in 1815.56 The perseverance of the family was tested by the building work. Samuel wrote in a letter to his daughter in 1800: ‘our House is not quite in order, but as everyday does something—every day there is less to do, so in time we may hope to finish & I hope our patience will last out’.57 More than a decade later, Robert Greg wrote to his mother on 2 May 1815, stating: ‘I rejoice to hear that Quarry Bank will be habitable in June, or the beginning of July’.58 Yet, in her response at the end of May 1815, Hannah expressed her concerns over the appearance of the property, which in her eyes did not reflect the amount of work taking place. The letter was written from Quarry Bank, which would suggest the family were living in the house whilst the service wing was being constructed. The illness mentioned in the letter is likely the reason the family chose to stay in the countryside. Nonetheless, this is significant, as it emphasises the values the family placed on their rural home, choosing to remain there in an inconvenient domestic arrangement, rather than return to unhealthy atmosphere of Manchester: One anxiety by that you should not think Q. Bank much disfigured for which however I fear you will in proportion to the very little addition of convenience attained. . . . You will find us, at least if you
‘A Little Paradise’ 53 come in the next 3 months not only rough & unfinished at QB but 5 or 6 coughing—the hooping [sic] cough indeed makes us more impatient to get into it . . . and we fear we cannot be in it [until] the early holidays—though we expect [to] be in a rough manner for John’s holidays, he brings his two sisters 1st August. God send us all a happy meeting by that time.59 There were two major enlargements of Quarry Bank House during the early nineteenth century, each corresponding with the family’s increasing amount of time spent there. The first enlargement, around 1802, doubled the size of the house. The two prominent façades of the property were altered, and the house was extended with a drawing room, entrance hall and a bay window to the western façade, and a cantilevered staircase was installed. There was also a conscious effort to separate the mill from the household, for example, a false window on the eastern façade offered privacy to the occupants of the drawing room from passing mill workers and visitors. Additional bedrooms were created by these improvements, and the cellars were further excavated to include the kitchen, coal cellar, wine cellar, dry and wet larders, storerooms and a small laundry for the family’s personal linen.60 The extent to which the property was altered in this period and the inclusion of designated service spaces and rooms for entertaining highlight the growing importance of Quarry Bank for the Gregs. It was clearly no longer a private house to be used occasionally by the family; instead, it had evolved into a second home. Significantly, there were no superfluous spaces at Quarry Bank House designed solely to be obvious communicators of wealth. Instead the property was only enlarged to suit the daily needs of the household, although this could have been the indirect result of patriarchal financial restraints. The final phase of alterations in 1814–15 coincided with the Gregs’ decision to make Quarry Bank their permanent residence. An additional service wing, containing service spaces and bedrooms for the children and servants, was constructed on the southern façade of the house adjoining the mill.61 The hierarchical status of the additional wing as a functional space, rather than a formal space, was evident from its construction and décor. It was slightly set back from the house to avoid offsetting the symmetrical façade, and the fenestration was smaller than the main house. Some of the coloured varnishes used within this part of the property were orange, green, mahogany, and chocolate.62 These darker colours easily disguised the wear and tear caused by vigorous daily use, whereas the formal entertaining rooms were painted pale blue to reflect the tranquillity of the space and emphasise the quality of furnishings.63 Although simple in its design, the architectural form of Quarry Bank House conformed with fashionable tastes for rural architecture, which became popular in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.64 In a poem written in 1808, Samuel and Hannah’s children described their
54 Thomas McGrath home at Quarry Bank in 1808 as a ‘mansion’, which was later amended by Hannah to a ‘cottage’.65 As John Crowley reveals, the lack of pretension displayed in the vernacular architecture of ‘cottages’ like Quarry Bank House supposedly implied comfort, as the houses were more aligned to their natural surroundings and the traditions of the countryside.66 From the amendment of the poem, it is evident Hannah saw her home in this light, less formal than their townhouse on King Street but more sophisticated and suited to the family’s needs than Oak Farmhouse in Styal.
Entertaining at Quarry Bank At Quarry Bank, Hannah was able to incorporate her charitable and compassionate nature openly into her daily routines, especially concerning the welfare and spiritual needs of the mill workers.67 The apprentices at the mill were removed from local poorhouses at the age of nine and raised within the enclosed Quarry Bank estate until they were at least eighteen years old.68 Occasionally some of the apprentices were brought into Quarry Bank House to support the four permanent, paid servants.69 As a family home from its inception, there were clearly defined gendered and status roles at Quarry Bank House when compared to King Street, which enabled Hannah to meet her expected position there with relative ease. Samuel and Hannah made careful considerations to avoid inconvenient domestic arrangements they had experienced at King Street. In their Manchester home, the constrained internal layout only permitted space for one staircase, which was shared by the entire household. In conducting their daily routines, the staircase acted as a liminal space where master or mistress and servants would cross paths and thus temporarily blur the two spheres that each represented. Nineteenth-century publications offering advice for servants continued to demonstrate the perception that the household with a single staircase was regarded as an inconvenience: In meeting a lady or gentleman on the stairs, if you are but a step or two up, go back and stand on the landing to give room. If you are too far up for this, stand on one side. Always remember in meeting, to retire and make way, or to stand aside.70 Therefore, at Quarry Bank House there was a separate staircase for the use of the servants and, although confined to the cellar, the kitchen and sculleries were well lit and well ventilated, highlighting the Gregs’ consideration for their servants. In 1808, Hannah could inadvertently but enthusiastically write about the cheerful domestic atmosphere of her Quarry Bank household: ‘instead of singing to my work, as I hear my maidens doing in the next room, I always think to mine’.71
‘A Little Paradise’ 55 Significantly, Hannah’s removal from the confines of society in Manchester and the expectations this had placed upon her status allowed her to cultivate her personal interests, especially those based around her Unitarian and moral beliefs. Although the source of the Gregs’ extreme wealth was always evident to visitors due to the location of Quarry Bank House and the mill, within their home the family did not feel the need to reaffirm their status through material possessions, as Hannah wrote: ‘I hope to see my friends become sensible that it is possible to be very happy without being very rich, and that money is only one, and that subordinate means of true enjoyment’.72 Visitors were often impressed by the family’s rejection of some of the cultural norms of their merchant–manufacturing class and their apparent emulation of an enlightened, uninhibited lifestyle, which adhered to new forms of respectability.73 In contrast to the early years of her marriage, Hannah became more self-assured in her character as she matured, and she was often the object of praise. Eliza Fletcher, an English travel writer, visited the Gregs at Quarry Bank in 1808 and stated: ‘[I] admired the cultivation of mind and refinement of manners which Mrs. Greg preserved in the midst of a money-making and somewhat unpolished community of merchants and manufacturers’.74 Likewise, John James Audubon enthusiastically described Hannah to his wife: Mrs Gregg [sic] is one of those rare exemples [sic] of the superior powers of Thy Sex over ours when education and Circumstances are combined—She is most aimiable [sic] Smart, quick, witty, positively Learned, with an Incomparable Memory, and as benevolent as Woman can be.75 As illustrated by Clive Edwards, ‘a well-established rural family often had little need to demonstrate their position in a hierarchy’, and, because of their urban and rural connections, the Gregs maintained relationships with both Manchester and Liverpool.76 In 1810, the Gregs had eighty-one guests to sleep at Quarry Bank and sixty-nine to dine.77 An impressive figure, as this predated both the family’s permanent move there and the construction of the service wing with additional bedrooms. The family simply adapted their routines around their guests, rather than adhering to the strict and formal routines they had experienced at King Street. The relaxed and largely informal daily routines the Gregs were able to cultivate at Quarry Bank were embraced by the family even after Hannah’s death in 1828, and they continued to impress visitors, as an account from Catherine Stanley, wife of Reverend Edward Stanley of Alderley, demonstrates: Have you ever been to Quarry Bank? It is such a picture of rational, happy life. Mr. Greg is quite a gentleman; his daughters have the
56 Thomas McGrath delightful simplicity of people who are perfectly satisfied in their place, and never trying to get out of it. He is rich, and he spends just as people do not generally spend their money, keeping a sort of open house, without pretension. If he has more guests than the old butler can manage, he has his maid-servants in to wait. . . . A large circle of connections, and literary people, and foreigners, and Scotch and Irish, are constantly dropping in, knowing they cannot come amiss. You may imagine how this sort of life makes the whole family sit loose to all the incumbrances and hindrances of society. They actually do not know what it is to be formal or dull: each with their separate pursuits and tastes, intelligent and well-informed.78
Creating a Paradise The homes of an eighteenth-century merchant or manufacturer represented much more than a domestic residence. At a public-facing level they communicated wealth and status, modernity and taste. On a personal level they reflected comfort, convenience and the personalities of their inhabitants. The location and architectural styles of these homes had a significant impact on what the occupants wished to communicate to society. At Quarry Bank, Samuel and Hannah were able to create their own ‘little paradise’, based upon a relaxed and informal domestic routine and set within the rural countryside. Samuel and Hannah had autonomous control over the construction of Quarry Bank House, and their decision to adapt the property in a piecemeal fashion across a number of years demonstrated the organic growth of a house in conjunction with the needs of the family. As a self-described ‘cottage’ but conforming more to the standards of a country villa, the house reflected the fashions of the era, and it was suitable for entertaining on a large scale, but it also highlighted the simplified, unpretentious habits of the Greg family. On the other hand, King Street represented the physical and mental constraints of an urban townhouse. The urban topography of Manchester dictated how space was prioritised, and the Gregs had little choice but to adapt their domestic space within the confines of an existing property that had not been designed for them or with their needs of the entire household taken into consideration. The warehouse and office in the outside space is perhaps most emblematic of this. Although it suited the daily routines of Samuel and his uncles before him, it offered little domestic comfort to Hannah and the children. In Manchester, the Gregs’ behaviours were also constrained by the formal conventions of their class. For Hannah this was most evident in the home, especially in the early years of her marriage, where she had an uneasy relationship with family members, acquaintances and household servants. However, at Quarry Bank the Gregs were able to cultivate their
‘A Little Paradise’ 57 own behaviours. They created a household that was not only physically comfortable but also morally comfortable, as their charitable works, simple lifestyle and the house itself were more closely aligned with their moralistic beliefs concerning wealth. This is significant, as it was the Gregs’ relaxed daily routines and their disregard for the money-driven cultural associations of their class that ultimately secured their positions of respectability and status among their visitors. Throughout this chapter, Hannah’s diaries and letters have been used to illustrate the roles of the wives of urban merchants and manufacturers. Her personal writings have personified the daily experiences of women in her position, and they have conveyed an often hidden, emotional response to the frustrations of domestic life. Although it was not an unusual decision for a wealthy family located in an urban environment to take a second home in the countryside, Hannah’s writings concerning the detrimental impact of urban life upon her physical and mental health and her general well-being contextualise the experiences of the elite in the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century town. The positive impacts of moving from an urban to rural environment and the new beginning offered by a new house are evident in Hannah’s writings. Daily domestic events were an initial concern for her as a newly married bride at King Street, but, as she became comfortable with her position as the mistress of a household, even more so in the relative seclusion of Quarry Bank, it is telling these concerns fall away, and household events are only intermittently and inadvertently revealed in her letters. This chapter also emphasised the nature of gender roles within the domestic sphere of the period. Samuel’s role as the head of the family allowed him to control the location, size and scale of the family’s countryside home. The conscious decision not to separate his domestic sphere entirely from his business sphere at Quarry Bank was a definitive example of the patriarchy displayed in mercantile and manufacturing families, even when the permeation of both spheres was no longer necessary, as the family had left the confines of the urban town. Although the domestic arrangement at Quarry Bank did not seem to have affected the family, the compromised location of the house and the mill communicated the status and background of the family to some visitors at Quarry Bank.
Notes 1. University of Liverpool, Special Collections and Archives; GB141 RP.II.1.64: Rathbone Papers; Letter from Hannah Greg to William Rathbone IV, 31 July 1798. 2. See: Mary B. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank: The Rise and Decline of a Family Firm 1750–1914 (Cambridge: The Press Syndicate, 1986); David Sekers, A Lady of Cotton: Hannah Greg, Mistress of Quarry Bank Mill (Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2015); Peter Spencer, Portrait of Hannah Greg 1766–1828 (Styal: Quarry Bank Mill Trust, 1985); Peter Spencer,
58 Thomas McGrath Portrait of Samuel Greg 1758–1834 (Styal: Quarry Bank Mill Trust Ltd, 1989). 3. See: Christine Casey, ‘The Dublin Domestic Formula’, in The EighteenthCentury Dublin Townhouse: Form, Function and Finance, ed. Christine Casey (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010); Stephen Hague, The Gentleman’s House in the British-Atlantic World 1680–1780 (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2010); Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, eds., Consumption and the Country House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998). 4. John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 229. 5. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank, 13. 6. Manchester Record Office: GB127.M9/40/2/16; Lamp Tax, 1765; Soane Museum: SM (2) 56/1/1A: David Mocatta, Site Plan of House in King Street, 1826. 7. Quarry Bank Archive: QBA765.1/9/79/32, Certain Records of the Greg Family, 1600–1800; R. H. Greg, The Gregs and Hydes &c. (1869), 25. 8. Manchester Mercury, January 7, 1783, 4. 9. QBA: QBA765.1/9/79/32; Greg, The Gregs and Hydes &c., 27. 10. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank, 13–15. 11. Ibid., 13–15. 12. QBA: QBA765.1/9/79/32; Greg, The Gregs and Hydes &c., 28–29. 13. Engravings of houses illustrate the second edition of Russel Casson and John Berry’s A Plan of the Towns of Manchester and Salford (1746) and a subsequent edition published by Berry in 1757. See: Chetham’s Library, Manchester: L.8.81 (1), Russel Casson and John Berry, A Plan of the Towns of Manchester and Salford (1741–1757). 14. 35 King Street was demolished in the mid-nineteenth century. However, several architectural drawings and floor plans survive for the period 1826–31, when the Bank of England purchased the property for £5250 and converted it into their first branch in Manchester. The descriptions of the layout of the property in this chapter are based on these plans. See: W. Marston Acres, The Bank of England From Within, 1694–1900: Volume II (London: Bank of England, 1931). 15. Soane Museum: SM (3) 56/1/32: Thomas Heath, Plan of the Ground Floor and Plan of the First Floor, 1826–1831. 16. UOL: GB141 RP.II.1.67: Letter from Hannah Greg to William Rathbone IV, January 1805. 17. QBA: QBA765.1/9/79/32, Certain Records of the Greg Family, 1600–1800; Ellen Melly, Reminiscences (1889), 37. 18. QBA: QBA765.1/9/79/32, Melly, Reminiscences, 33. 19. Vickery, The Gentlemen’s Daughter, 206. 20. Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, Complete List of Members & Officers of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, From its Institution on February 28th 1781, to April 28th 1906 (Manchester: Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 1896), 24.; QBA: QBA765.1/9/79/32, Melly, Reminiscences, 34. 21. Before her marriage, Hannah had been involved with members of the Octonian Society in Liverpool, a group dedicated to discussing literary and
‘A Little Paradise’ 59 philosophical matters. The group had met at her mother’s house on Paradise Street. See: Quarry Bank Archives: Hannah Lightbody, Diary, Volume One, January 3, 1787 (Item on loan from the Janes family). A full transcript of Hannah’s diaries can be found in David Sekers, ed., ‘The Diary of Hannah Lightbody’, Enlightenment and Dissent, no. 24 (2008): 1–176. 22. QBA: Hannah Greg, Diary, Volume Two; Saturday [N. D. November/ December 1789] (Item on loan from the Janes family). 23. QBA: Greg, Diary, Volume Two; November 1789. 24. QBA: Greg, Diary, Volume Two; 24 November 1789. 25. QBA: Greg, Diary, Volume Two; [N. D. 1790]. 26. Ibid. 27. QBA: QBA: GLB.1.479, Letter from Elizabeth Hodgson to Hannah Greg [N. D. c.1789/1790]. 28. QBA: QBA765.1/9/79/32, Melly, Reminiscences, 34. 29. QBA: QBA765.1/9/6/5: Letter addressed to Mr Greg, King Street Manchester from Hannah Lightbody, Sunday Morning [c.1789]. 30. QBA: Greg, Diary, Volume Two; 23 November 1789. 31. QBA: Greg, Diary, Volume Two; Saturday [N. D. November/December 1789]; QBA: Greg, Diary, Volume Two; [N. D. 1790]. 32. QBA: Greg, Diary, Volume Two; [N. D. 1790]. 33. QBA: Greg, Diary, Volume Two; 23 November 1789. 34. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 136. 35. Ibid., 135. 36. UOL: GB141 RP.II.1.47: Letter from William Rathbone IV to Hannah Greg, August 8, 1801. 37. Manchester Mercury, 10 August 1802, 4; Manchester Mercury, August 24, 1802, 4. 38. Manchester Mercury, 26 April 1803, 4. 39. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter, 142. 40. Ibid., 142. 41. QBA: Greg, Diary, Volume Two; [N. D. 1790]. 42. UOL: GB 141 RP.II.1.64: Letter from Hannah Greg to William Rathbone IV, 31 July 1798. 43. QBA: Hannah Greg, Diary, Volume Two; [N. D. 1790]. 44. Ardwick Hall was just a mile from the centre of Manchester, and initially Robert and Nathaniel Hyde considered selling their King Street property in the 1770s. An advertisement from the Manchester Mercury in 1775 states: ‘To be SOLD, by private CONTRACT. . . . A Large modern-built HOUSE, with the Warehouse, Coach-house, Stable and Appurtenances, being Freehold of Inheritance, situated at the Upper Part of King-Street, in Manchester aforesaid, in the Possession of Mr Nathan Hyde, at the yearly Rent of 78l’. Manchester Mercury, 15 August 1775, 4. 45. Jane Longmore, ‘Rural Retreats: Liverpool Slave Traders and their Country Houses’, in Slavery and the British Country House, ed. Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann (Swindon: English Heritage, 2013), 43–54. 46. Marguerite Dupree, ‘Firm, Family and Community: Managerial and Household Strategies in Staffordshire Potteries in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, in From Family Firms to Corporate Capitalism: Essays in Business and Industrial History in Honour of Peter Mathias, ed. Kristine Bruland and Patrick O’Brien (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 53–55. 47. Rose, The Gregs of Styal, 49–50. 48. MRO: GB127. C5/6/9, Greg Account Book; Invoice to Taylor & Smith, Nursery and Seedsmen, 30 October 1818.
60 Thomas McGrath 49. Samuel Greg allowed his children to play in a cave on the edge of the garden. Quarry Bank Mill: QBA: GLB:1.497, Letter from Bessy Greg to Mary Hodgson, November 1801. 50. UOL: GB141 RP.II.1.42B: Letter from William Rathbone IV to Hannah Greg, April 20, 1795. 51. Audubon, 19 September 1826, in Patterson, John James Audubon’s Journal, 181. 52. A letter from William Ewart Gladstone to his sister, March 1828 in John Henshall, Quarry Bank House and Garden: Styal Conservation Plan (Quarry Bank: National Trust, March 2006), 20. 53. James Audubon, 10 October 1826, in Daniel Patterson, ed., John James Audubon’s Journal of 1826: The Voyage to ‘The Birds of America’ (Nebraska: University of Nebraska, 2011), 230. 54. UOL: GB 141 RP.II.1.64: Letter from Hannah Greg to William Rathbone IV, 31 July 1798. 55. Christopher Chalklin, The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study of the Building Process, 1740–1820 (London: Edward Arnold Ltd, 1974), 126. 56. MRO: GB127. C5/6/9; Mr Greg to Mr Wyatt, 1815. 57. Quarry Bank Mill: QBA765.1.9.6.2, Letter to Bessy Greg, June 1, 1800. 58. Quarry Bank Mill; QBA: GLB 1.272, Letter from Robert Greg to Hannah Greg, 2 May 1815. 59. Quarry Bank Mill; QBA: GLB 1.1.63, Letter from Hannah Greg to Robert Greg, 22 May 1815. 60. MRO: GB127. C5/6/9, Mrs Greg in private housekeeping to Samuel Greg Esq., November 1814: The family would later pay a Mrs Carr each month for processing their laundry, but it is unknown whether she came to the house or if the laundry was sent out. 61. Samuel Greg’s tax assessments from October 1814 reveal Quarry Bank House had 33 windows at that time. This figure remained consistent for subsequent years, suggesting that the service wing had been completed by this time. MRO; GB127. C5/6/9, Samuel Greg Esq. to the Collectors of Assessed Taxes, 25 October 1814. 62. MRO: GB127.C5/6/9; Plastering done by John Wyatt, August 1815. 63. John Morley, ‘W. R. Greg—A Sketch’, Critical Miscellanies, vol. III (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1904), 219. 64. Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 18–19. 65. Sekers, A Lady of Cotton, 210. 66. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort, 229. 67. Sekers, A Lady of Cotton, 157–62. 68. Ibid., 154. 69. MRO: GB127. C5/6/9; Accounts, 5 April 1815. 70. Mrs. Motherly, The Servant’s Behaviour Book (London: Bell and Daldy, 1859), 48. 71. UOL: GB141 RP.II.1.70: Letter from Hannah Greg to Hannah Mary Rathbone, 24 March 1808. 72. Extract of a letter from Hannah Greg to the Rathbones, N.D. in Spencer, Portrait of Hannah Greg, 5. 73. Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability (London: Routledge, 2001), 189–212. 74. Eliza Fletcher, The Autobiography of Mrs Fletcher: with letters and other memorials, edited by a survivor of her family (Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas, 1875), 97.
‘A Little Paradise’ 61 75. Audubon, 6 October 1826, in Patterson, John James Audubon’s Journal, 225. 76. Clive Edwards, Turning Houses into Homes: A History of the Retailing and Consumption of Domestic Furnishings (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 85. 77. QBA765.1/9/6/15: List of Company at Quarry Bank, 1810. 78. Morley, ‘W. R. Greg—A Sketch’, 219.
3 Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines of the EighteenthCentury Swedish Elite Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s Diaries Johanna Ilmakunnas This chapter engages with daily lives and daily routines of eighteenthcentury Swedish nobility, arguing that daily routines and practices were shaped by personal interests and prospects, gender and life-stage. The focus is specifically on work, which was, in a number of ways that this chapter explores, an essential feature structuring the daily routines of the nobility. Recent scholarship has nuanced our understanding of early modern work significantly, bringing into focus the varying nature of work, parallel occupations and invisible work categories such as care work, housework, kin work and work of leisure.1 Noblemen were mostly engaged in estate management, governance and politics—locally, nationally and globally. They made careers in the army, diplomacy, administration and at court.2 They themselves often described their activities as work, even though scholars have less often analysed the daily activities of European elites from the point of view of work and labour.3 While noblewomen bore the main responsibility of the household management and child-rearing, they were also engaged in social and cultural life and politics. Some were also able to make a career at court.4 Historians of work and labour concentrate in their analyses chiefly on the labouring classes and mostly reckon among labour and work tasks that were carried out in order to earn a living.5 However, this focus neglects much intellectual and artistic work, which was arguably seminal for the lifestyle and self-understanding of the elites.6 Furthermore, the social life that formed a key part of daily routines in aristocratic circles across Europe can be described as the work of leisure aimed at maintaining and consolidating the seemingly leisured and easy lifestyle of eighteenth-century elites. The impression of a polite and cultivated lifestyle was built on substantial effort, conscious training of body and mind and self-cultivation from early childhood onwards.7 Social life can be regarded as work for elites, work that aimed to increase a person’s or a family’s cultural, social and material capital.8 Viewing the daily lives and routines of the European elite through the twin lenses of work and life-stage is essential for our understanding of their lifestyle and identity. The chapter aims to discuss both the
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 63 uniformity and variety of daily life among the nobility in eighteenth-century Sweden. It explores how daily practices were formed by life-stage, gender and work-related activities. For young people, daily routines were shaped predominantly through their upbringing and education, dictated by gender, status and potential prospects in life. For adults, daily routines and work-related activities were characterised again by gender and personal interests but also by marital status, social rank and setting, whether urban or rural. Daily routines were reshaped again when people grew old, were widowed and possibly withdrew from active social and cultural life. Accordingly, the discussion is divided into three life-stages: adolescence, adulthood and old age.9 Whilst these are obviously overlapping, they are applied in order to facilitate the analysis and to better enlighten change or, indeed, continuity in daily routines, especially those formed by work.
Microhistory Perspective: Count Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna This chapter takes a case study and micro-historical perspective, drawing upon the diaries written by Count Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna from 1766 to 1770, in 1780 and in 1805. The diaries from the eighteenth century were written mainly for Oxenstierna’s own pleasure, but they also offered opportunities for him to improve his skills in language and writing—a motivation on which he reflects in the diaries themselves.10 The journal of 1805 is written in the form of a travel diary, addressed to Oxenstierna’s wife, Lovisa Christina Wachtschlager. It recounts a journey he took to visit his mother at the family seat at Skenäs in Södermanland, c.160 kilometres south of Stockholm. He travelled with his twelve-yearold son, Gustaf Göran Gabriel, and his fifteen-year-old nephew, Erik Johan Gabriel, whilst his wife stayed in Stockholm because of her fragile health.11 Oxenstierna was well aware of the conventions of diary writing and his own position in the literary genre, writing as contemplation of the self and documenting daily events either for himself or for his wife. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna was born in 1750 in Skenäs as the eldest of four brothers in an impecunious aristocratic family, which, from his father’s side, belonged to one of the most powerful families of seventeenthcentury Sweden. This kinship tie has been described by an early biographer of Oxenstierna as ‘the tragedy of great ancestors’.12 The burden of illustrious ancestors, financial distress and self-reflection on his capacities and skills, hopes and fears are constantly present in Oxenstierna’s diaries, especially when he writes about his career prospects and his daily routines, both pleasurable and tedious. The connections that the family of Oxenstierna’s mother, the Gyllenborgs, enjoyed with leading politicians and literate figures of the eighteenth century were formative, especially since Oxenstierna’s uncle—the poet, courtier and civil servant
64 Johanna Ilmakunnas Count Gustaf Fredrik Gyllenborg—steered his nephew’s education. Oxenstierna himself wished from a young age to write poetry, and he published acclaimed works before his twentieth birthday. Consequently, in scholarship, he has been regarded as a poet and representative of eighteenth-century nature Romanticism instead of a courtier, diplomat and civil servant—despite his long engagement in royal and administrative service.13 In 1791, the forty-one-year-old Oxenstierna married Lovisa Christina Wachschlager, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of a wealthy and highranking courtier, Gustaf Wachtschlager and his wife, Christina Holmcreutz.14 One of the key reasons for the marriage was Oxenstierna’s hopes for ameliorating his economic situation through a favourable match.15 Oxenstierna was somewhat older than noblemen in eighteenth-century Sweden usually were when marrying for the first time. This suggests that he did not seek actively to marry earlier, because his connections and lineage would probably have weighed more than his financial situation in a society where marriages between noblemen and daughters of wealthy bourgeoisie were anything but extraordinary.16 The contradiction between his hopes and aspirations and the reality of his life-course makes Oxenstierna an especially enlightening case study of the ways in which daily routines, spaces and relationships construct and reconstruct identities and practices through a person’s life cycle. Shaping Routines and Learning to Work in Adolescence In his diary from 1766 to 1768, Oxenstierna recorded his daily life and daily routines in French, although later diaries were mainly in Swedish. The then fifteen-year-old Oxenstierna wrote that his aim was to keep an exact diary of his doings, including his faults and reflections on events. ‘I will draw a picture of my studies, my workings and my pleasures’, he wrote on 1 January 1766.17 The daily routines in the lives of adolescents in the families of nobility and aristocracy varied depending upon the rank and the place of residence of the family, as well as on gender. Surviving diaries and letters of adolescents give an impression of highly structured lives in which routines had a central role.18 Oxenstierna’s diary records the relatively simple daily life of an aristocratic family living mainly in the countryside, with sons whose classical education was aimed at securing careers in state administration or the army. Oxenstierna’s daily routines during his adolescence can be explored through four work-related themes: education and studies, kin work and correspondence, handiwork, and gardening. Oxenstierna’s days were largely shaped around his studies, which he most often described in his diary as work (travail) or as studying (etudier). As a child, Oxenstierna had been sent to a boarding school in Stockholm to learn French, dancing, drawing and polite manners.19 However,
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 65 most of his education took place at home at Skenäs, where he was taught by tutors, supervised by his uncle Gustaf Fredrik Gyllenborg. He studied French and Latin, literature and poetry, classical mythology, philosophy, ethics, drawing, mathematics, history and geography. Most of his time was engaged in studies that prepared him for a career as a civil servant and courtier, even though he would have preferred a quieter life in the countryside.20 Later he studied at Uppsala University, accompanied by his tutor—as was common among the elites. In 1767, he passed an examination that qualified him to work as a clerk in state administration.21 Oxenstierna wrote short entries in his diary almost daily, creating a routine not only of studies but also of diary keeping in which he engaged himself mainly in the evenings. Even when he wrote he had done nothing during the day, he had often read for pleasure or taken a walk. Oxenstierna was almost painfully aware of the contradiction between his own hopes and the expectations of the family based on the family traditions and his position as firstborn son. He preferred a simple country life and had little ambition for the expected career in administration, diplomacy or politics. Even though his studies directed his daily routines, Oxenstierna’s identity as a poet was already taking shape in his adolescence. His experiments in poetry were encouraged both by his tutor and by his uncle, both well-known poets of their era.22 For Oxenstierna, keeping a diary was an exercise in French language and style, as were the letters that he wrote copiously, since letter-writing was an essential form of expression during the eighteenth century, regardless of the subject. He noted in 1789 that he never wrote less than eight to ten letters on post days.23 However, in his adolescence, the number of letters was less pretentious, and he records in his diary mainly letters to his cousins and other relatives. Letter-writing shaped both daily and yearly routines because it was connected to the days when post arrived and was sent and because certain forms of letter-writing, such as greetings for a New Year, were connected to annual rhythms. Correspondence was a central routine that shaped the eighteenth-century world, and elite children learned from the age of five or six to formulate and write letters. Their importance was emphasised since letters were viewed as the written form of discussion and were often written to be circulated amongst the family or other circles and to be read out loud.24 Networks were constructed and maintained through correspondence, which was particularly important within family and kin. As such, letterwriting to family members, young and old, can be conceptualised as kin work—that is, the time-consuming maintenance of family ties and friendships, where every relation was a form of social capital that could be used and reused for a number of purposes. Scholarship has stressed both the importance of family ties and women’s key role and responsibility in maintaining familial and kinship contacts through letter-writing, visiting and gifting.25 Despite female dominance of kin work and the often public
66 Johanna Ilmakunnas character of male correspondence, men’s letter-writing can also be seen as playing a role in kin work.26 In the early modern world, almost every relationship was maintained through letters. Administration, diplomacy, sciences and humanities, as well as economic transactions, all required letter-writing. These different functions of letters permeate through Oxenstierna’s diaries and his education. He wrote letters to family members and to his friends. He was interested in style and language and sometimes showed his letters to his tutor or his uncle in order to get advice on epistolary style, although he was generally considered mature enough to write his own letters. In his diary, the adolescent Oxenstierna comments on the style of his letters and whether he was pleased with those he wrote. Letter-writing was for Oxenstierna a rehearsal of style and taste, as well as a meaningful way to keep up connections with his cousins, other relatives and friends. He also wrote a number of thank-you letters and letters commissioning different goods. The nature of Oxenstierna’s correspondence is often kin work. In his diary, he defined letter-writing as work when he wrote out of duty. Mostly this meant letters in which he thanked various people who had written to him, done him a service or given a gift to him. The letter-writing itself, epistolary style and conventions or the breaking of them, was not a heavy burden for Oxenstierna, who already at the age of fifteen, when he started his diary, had an eloquent style and language. Correspondence became work and a tiresome routine when he did not value or enjoy it. This was especially true for letters with New Year’s wishes, something that the young Oxenstierna considered as the most tiresome habit ever invented.27 Whereas studies and letter-writing that structured the major part of Oxenstierna’s adolescent life honed him for his future career in administration, diplomacy and at court, two other work-related activities, manual crafts and gardening, were pleasant for him. In 1766, he received a lathe that his uncle Gustaf Fredrik Gyllenborg had acquired from Stockholm. Almost daily, Oxenstierna devoted dark evenings after his studies to wood-turning. In summer, Oxenstierna took long walks and hunted in light evenings and at night, but he clearly needed more activities for the long evenings in autumn and in winter, which is probably why Gyllenborg acquired the lathe, thus facilitating what was seen as an educational activity for his nephew. Oxenstierna became a passionate turner who produced small objects such as boxes, pipes, buttons and canes that he gave as presents to his relatives and friends. In 1767, he wrote in his diary: I finished the previous year by the lathe, I began this one in the same place. Never has a person been more diligent in this work than I [have been], moreover, I have hardly done anything else all this time. The day left me by the lathe, and found me there.28
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 67 For Oxenstierna, turning became a pleasurable pastime that strongly structured his days, mainly because he could not stop and could spend a whole day on turning if he was not obliged to study.29 Turning was a popular pastime among aristocrats and royals of the Enlightenment, and a lathe was procured in many households, to be used mainly by male members of the family.30 In his dairy, Oxenstierna refers to turning both as work and as art, which emphasises the double character of handiwork and manual crafts in the eighteenth century; they were both constructive occupations and a form of art that could be mastered through the alliance of the eye and hand and through persevering practice. Oxenstierna got satisfaction from working and creating with his hands. He enjoyed collecting different kinds of wood, planning the objects he would make and deciding to whom he would give them as presents. For him, manual work and the making of things was pleasurable, even though many of the objects he tried to make broke despite his persistent efforts.31 Gardening and growing flowers were also part of Oxenstierna’s daily practices in his adolescence, while at home in the family estate Skenäs. In January 1766, he received the flower seeds he had ordered from Stockholm, and in March he began to work in the garden. However, the winter continued, and snow prevented him from launching into gardening. Later in the same spring, he planted new flowers to replace the ones that had frozen because of the winter weather. All through the summer of 1766, the then sixteen-year-old Oxenstierna nurtured his flowers and worked in the garden. In his diary, he describes gardening and flower growing as ‘work’ (travail), although gardening clearly gave him great pleasure.32 He constructed a shelter for the plants he was cultivating, enjoying the manual labour.33 While studying at Uppsala University in 1767, he bought seeds from the gardener of Carl von Linné. Back in Skenäs, Oxenstierna potted the seed, probably the amaryllis he later mentions, laying out a small garden on the windowsill in his room, which, by January 1768, contained more than twenty flowerpots. He got instructions from the gardener at Skenäs and worked the winter months in his little indoor garden where flowering amaryllises and hyacinths were admired by guests at the house.34 Through the display of flowering bulbs, Oxenstierna connected with the interest of eighteenth-century elites in botany, horticulture and gardening and made these part of his daily social practice. Oxenstierna continued his garden work at Skenäs during the summer of 1768, together with his tutor Olof Bergklint and Jon Dubb, the tutor of his cousin Jean Henning Gyllenborg. On some islands near Skenäs, they logged and cleared underbrush in order to create alleys, ramparts, grottoes and promenades, which Oxenstierna described as quite tiring work that amused him greatly.35 Eighteenth-century garden ideals emphasised the naturalness of forms and elements of the garden, whereas the interplay between man, nature and culture was materialised in man-made
68 Johanna Ilmakunnas grottoes, ruins, ramparts, pavilions and pagodas.36 While walking in the garden formed a daily routine for many elites, especially in the countryside, we see here that creating a number of the elements in a fashionable park could also form an occupation for elites, at least for a male adolescent and middling groups such as tutors. For Oxenstierna, adolescence meant hard work, concentration on studies, reading and letter-writing, as well as manual work such as woodturning and horticulture that counterbalanced the intellectual efforts required for the studies. His work and the pattern of daily activities varied considerably according to the season and the weather. In late spring and summer, Oxenstierna spent the light evenings hunting, working in the garden and taking long walks. In autumn and winter, he was mostly indoors studying, writing and reading, or engaged in manual work and growing potted flowers.
Adulthood and Forms of Work The daily practices that probably moulded adult noblemen most in eighteenth-century Sweden were estate management, a career in the army, civil administration or court and engagement in politics.37 Because of the Swedish political system, the power of the sovereign was weak from 1721 to 1772, a period called the Age of Liberty by contemporaries. The political Estates, nobility, priests, burghers and peasants, held political power, and the nobility effectively led the country. Since every noble family could send a representative to the diet and the majority of the high offices were exclusively reserved for nobles, politics characterised daily life in many aristocratic families.38 However, in eighteenth-century Sweden, a nobleman could advance across career paths, rarely ending his career on the same branch where it started. This was particularly true of aristocrats who held high offices in the army, in administration and at court. Oxenstierna’s career path followed the pattern of changing occupations, although he never became an officer, as his three brothers did.39 Moreover, because the family lived on the estate of Oxenstierna’s mother’s family, which, after the death of Oxenstierna’s father in 1788 was inherited by Oxenstierna’s cousin, Jan Henning Gyllenborg, estate management was not an activity for which Oxenstierna himself was responsible as an adult. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna started his adult life and took his first steps on a career path as a clerk—as did many of his peers. He completed a degree at Uppsala University in 1767, after which he took an exam (kansliexam) to enter to the Royal Chancellery (Kungliga kansliet) and commenced work in the chancellery, thus embarking on a long career as a diplomat, courtier and civil servant.40 It was common that young noblemen studied at universities and academies, both in Sweden and abroad, but it was more unusual to gain a degree. Even though a thorough
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 69 education and diligent studies were pivotal for aristocrats, completing a university degree was regarded as being more suitable for sons of the lower nobility, bourgeoisie and clergy. However, a kansliexam guaranteed a post in administration and was thus important for Oxenstierna, whose family was exalted but poor. The need to work for a living and to economise, as well as the monotony of copying documents in the chancellery, are recurrent themes in Oxenstierna’s diaries. His daily routines from his early adulthood can be explored through three themes related to work: clerical duties, literary work and work of leisure and sociability. In October 1768, at the age of eighteen, Oxenstierna moved from his childhood home Skenäs to Stockholm and began working in the Royal Chancellery. His daily routines changed from rural to urban, from the freedom of an adolescent to a daily structure of an adult (albeit very young) man, working more for his future career than for a living. Working as a clerk was a necessary springboard to more demanding and prestigious posts that included both better opportunities for advancing one’s career and a higher salary. In eighteenth-century Sweden, many educated young men entered local and national administration, but only those from the aristocracy advanced to the highest offices. When Oxenstierna left home, his mother, Sara Gyllenborg, helped him to pack up his clothing, much of which she had sewn herself. For Oxenstierna, his mother’s needlework was a sign of her tender care, but it also allowed him to economise because of his well-stocked wardrobe, although he later completed his wardrobe with purchases from merchants in Stockholm. Soon Oxenstierna also bought a new garment in coarse cloth to be worn in the chancellery, where the exceedingly dirty tables and fallen inkwells were dangerous for any better-quality garments.41 The chancellery work mostly comprised copying administrative documents. Even though he described his occupation sneeringly, especially work that he did not particularly appreciate, he often spent the whole day in the chancellery, copying and transcribing documents from morning to late in the evening.42 Younger staff members were expected to be diligent and obedient, yet they were also viewed by their superiors as promising future officeholders. Oxenstierna, like many of his peers, worked without a salary in the hope of rapid career advancement.43 In 1770, Oxenstierna was appointed as commission secretary (commissions-sekreterare) to the Swedish embassy in Vienna, where he worked closely with the Swedish ambassador, Count Nils Barck and aspired to a diplomatic career. Despite the change of office and country, his daily duties remained mostly the same monotonous copying and letter-writing he had experienced in Stockholm. The most significant difference was perhaps the need to learn German and to cipher, which together occupied a major part of Oxenstierna’s daily programme. On 4 January 1771, he wrote in his diary that ciphering was his daily occupation, so ordinary that he probably would write about it no more.44 Four days later, he
70 Johanna Ilmakunnas wrote only the short entry: ‘24091076112734123527601303,’ stressing thus the quotidian nature of cipher; yet the meaning of the entry remains obscure.45 More generally, he regarded copying and transcribing of documents as dull, unstimulating and, after hours sitting at the desk with a pile of documents to be copied, physically tiring.46 As in any office, the youngest workers were assigned the most monotonous tasks, but noblemen advanced relatively rapidly to more demanding posts. Oxenstierna did so when he moved from the chancellery to the Swedish embassy in Vienna, yet he reflected at the very beginning of his career whether his advancement would have been faster had he chosen the army instead of royal administration.47 The clerical work at the chancellery and at the Swedish embassy in Vienna shaped Oxenstierna’s daily life and routines during his formative years of early adulthood. Working days were long and copying documents was repetitive—both of which Oxenstierna emphasised throughout his early diaries.48 Later, he advanced quickly to high positions at court, although this reflected the wishes of King Gustav III rather than Oxenstierna’s own aspirations.49 Gustav III was historically aware and skilfully used the past to consolidate his power. For him, Oxenstierna embodied his ancestor, the statesman and builder of Sweden to a modern state, rikskansler Count Axel Oxenstierna, close to King Gustav II Adolf, military commander in the Thirty Years’ War and the sovereign that secured Sweden as a great power in the first half of the seventeenth century.50 Consequently, Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna advanced to high positions, such as kanslipresident in 1786, largely because of his family heritage. Equally important was that he had no career ambitions or marked administrative skills and thus would not oppose Gustav III’s move towards absolutism.51 Despite his plans for an administrative or a diplomatic career in his youth, he would have preferred to devote himself to his literary work and to rural life, but he was forced to earn his living at least partly because of his limited economic resources. A shift is apparent in Oxenstierna’s work and activities between his early adulthood and when he was appointed to a number of high offices by King Gustav III, from 1774, when he was appointed to the chamberlain at the age of twenty-four, to 1792, when he was appointed to riksmarskalk at the age of forty-two.52 He had more responsibilities, not only in state administration but also as an office-holding courtier and a representative of the nobility on a number of diets. A growing number of administrative tasks required thorough acquaintance with state affairs and the ability to act in new milieus, such as on diets, at court, and in the highest administration.53 According to his contemporaries, Oxenstierna had little interest in such things; nevertheless, he continued his court career after the death of the King Gustav III in 1792, throughout the regency covering the minority of the King Gustav IV Adolph until 1796 and after the deposition of Gustav IV Adolf in 1809.
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 71 For Oxenstierna, writing poetry and reading were the occupations he enjoyed most and for which he had the greatest ambition throughout his life. It is also the work on which Oxenstierna has been most esteemed by posterity: the historiography of the Swedish eighteenth-century regards him as a key literary figure, a poet of the pre-Romantic movement who published his earliest works in the 1770s, when he was in his twenties.54 In his diaries, Oxenstierna frequently discussed his writings and his aspirations in this field, even though letters formed a more important medium for literate discussion. Particularly important in this regard was the correspondence with his previous tutor, the poet Olof Bergklint, who encouraged Oxenstierna in writing poetry.55 Oxenstierna sometimes wrote his diary in verse, both for his own amusement and to practice metrical and rhythmical composition.56 The diaries do not, however, reveal how often Oxenstierna wrote poetry or how he arranged his literate work. Work for elites went beyond office holding and into their social lives, which formed a substantial part of daily routines in aristocratic circles across Europe. This ‘work of leisure’—including social gatherings and parties, concerts, opera and theatre and visits, promenades and pleasure gardens—was particularly important for aristocrats with political or social ambitions. Indeed, eighteenth-century ‘social politics’ underpinned the close connection of politics and social life, as well as women’s role in political life.57 In Oxenstierna’s life, the entanglement of social and political life was palpable from his youth onwards. The significance of social politics and the work of leisure is highlighted in his diaries in the shape of dinner parties, visits to politically powerful men and women, trips to the theatre and opera and the literary societies of which Oxenstierna was a member. At the turn of the 1770s, when the young Oxenstierna worked as a clerk at the royal chancellery, he usually attended no more than one or two social occasions a day. On one Sunday in February 1769, he went to church in the morning, attended a ball at the royal palace in the evening and afterwards ate supper with a high-ranking civil servant.58 While working as commission secretary at the Swedish embassy in Vienna between 1770 and 1772, Oxenstierna’s social circles were limited to those in which the ambassador Barck chose to engage him. In the winter, this largely meant concerts arranged at the embassy or occasional evenings at the theatre; summers were mostly spent in the country with Barck and his wife, dealing with the ambassador’s correspondence.59 This was in contrast with the intensity of late eighteenth-century social politics, which meant a significant increase in Oxenstierna’s work of leisure. On Saturday 19 February 1780, for example, he spent the afternoon with his peers—planning a fete at the Freemasonry lodge to which he belonged—and then dined with friends at the Exchange. In the evening, Oxenstierna had dinner at the king’s table, attended a ball at the royal palace and played cards there until four o’clock the following morning.60
72 Johanna Ilmakunnas Even though it is not always meaningful to separate work and leisure when discussing the lifestyle and daily routines of aristocrats, analysing social life as work of leisure highlights the importance of social and cultural life for success in many occupations and endeavours, be it on the level of a person, family or state. Oxenstierna records in his diaries social events that clearly were carried out for pleasure but also many occasions when they were more a duty and a part of his work either in the chancellery in Stockholm in the late 1760s, in the Swedish embassy in Vienna in the early 1770s or at court in the 1780s. Playing cards, an indispensable part of eighteenth-century social life, was especially tedious for Oxenstierna, but he also found suppers organised by the ladies-in-waiting in their apartments in the royal palace of Stockholm very wearisome.61 According to acerbic notes in his diary, the small apartments were crammed with courtiers who watched the king play chess for hours, ate cold food, drank lukewarm drinks and stood on swollen feet because there were no chairs.62 Elite women’s participation was crucial to social life and the work of leisure: an importance that gives marriage significance beyond being a key stage of a person’s life cycle and central to the dynastic interests of the aristocracy. A favourable match could forward a nobleman’s career prospects or political ambitions through his wife’s role in the work of leisure. Nevertheless, despite frequently reflecting on his future, marriage does not figure in Oxenstierna’s diaries before he wrote the travel diary for his wife in 1805. Furthermore, he rarely mentions any plans for marrying in his journals, even though he frequently writes about women with whom he fell in love or had a relationship.63 Apparently, marriage was not an issue that occupied him when in his twenties, yet in 1780 he wrote in his diary that he wished it to happen because otherwise there was nothing to write. His wishes were that his debts would be paid and that he would be rich and married. One of his friends had proposed the daughter of a wealthy merchant who could be won as Oxenstierna’s wife despite his miserable economic conditions. Oxenstierna’s potential marriage was a topic at court in 1780, where King Gustav III quite plainly expressed his negative view on the planned marriage.64 Presumably, the king’s disapproval was connected to his endeavour to orchestrate the marriages of his favourites. Nevertheless, the king did not choose a wife for Oxenstierna, as he did for some other courtiers. Oxenstierna eventually married in 1791, choosing as a wife Lovisa Christina Wachtschlager. Their only child, Gustaf Göran Gabriel, called Gösta by his parents, was born in 1793.65 Parenthood moulded daily life and shaped parental duties,66 as did the poor health of Wachtschlager, who often was confined to her bed at the family’s home in Stockholm.67 Oxenstierna took responsibility for his son’s French studies and wrote from the country estate Skenäs to his wife how their son learned needlework and had much more stamina for his music lessons than when in Stockholm.68
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 73 The routines, studies and work that had filled Oxenstierna’s days when he was an adolescent were repeated in his son’s childhood. In addition to schooling and handicrafts, there were the skills that were essential to aristocratic life and sociability: foreign languages, conversation, music and reading were all carefully practised and polished from an early age. By the turn of the century, Oxenstierna had reached the stage where he, instead of being the object of education, was himself responsible for his son’s education.
Old Age—Structuring the Everyday Through Routines Aristocrats did not always retreat from their duties in old age. Although the majority of army officers belonging to the nobility retired from active service and sold their commissions, they often switched to a civil career, which they could maintain for decades.69 At court, many noblemen withdrew from service later in life, but it was more common for female courtiers to continue in service until they died.70 Estate management, social obligations and in many cases literary, scholarly or scientific work did not depend on age. When defining work as a socially constructed activity, allowing a flexibility that embraces wider perspective of workrelated activities than those aimed more squarely at maintenance, it is evident that work and working did not cease at any age; it changed character. Furthermore, defining old age is not straightforward since it depended both on how a person experienced his or her age and how others constructed an understanding of someone being old. These were often—but not exclusively—connected to the physical age. Elite persons often defined themselves as old from their fifties, while younger people tended to regard those in their forties as being old.71 For Oxenstierna, an important change in daily routines and the nature of work coincided with his withdrawal from his administrative offices as he neared his fiftieth birthday. In 1805, Oxenstierna had a daily routine of writing in his diary, addressed to his wife, what he and his relatives did in the countryside at Skenäs where Oxenstierna spent the summer with his son and mother. His wife eschewed travelling because of her frail health and stayed in Stockholm. Skenäs is where Oxenstierna had lived his childhood and adolescence, and it was to Skenäs that he attached his most emotional and poetic experiences. His diary writing was also more emotional than it had been earlier in his life: Oxenstierna explicitly wished to share his daily life, routines and joys with his wife, but instead of writing letters, the daily diary was sent to her on a weekly basis.72 In this diary, written at an advanced age from a summerlong visit to his childhood home, where especially the countryside, woods and fields were important for Oxenstierna, he reflected on
74 Johanna Ilmakunnas ageing—particularly visible in his seventy-nine-year-old mother Sara Gyllenborg—and on memories that certain dates, places and events awakened in him. At the end of July 1805, after spending a day with his mother and other family members, Oxenstierna took a solitary walk along familiar footpaths and sat on the same rock he used to sit on when he was a youth, writing poems praising the beauty of nature. His reminiscent spirit woke the gods of his youth: he wrote to his wife and added a long poem in his diary, addressed to the Muses of poetry and song.73 Writing memoirs, editing one’s previous writings and compiling and organising family papers was a form of work typical for aristocrats in old age. It was about self-reflection as well as reflecting on the family history in the past and in the future. Indeed, for elite culture, it was important to record family history, illustrious careers, social connections and friendships but also daily events and daily routines. Moreover, the actual deed of writing a diary was a record for posterity, even though Oxenstierna claimed to write only for his own pleasure or for entertaining both himself and his wife. While at Skenäs, Oxenstierna planned to edit his poems in a second volume. He ensconced himself in the two rooms in the main building in which he had lived in his childhood and where he had studied and written most of his poetry. He organised all his papers and chose which poems he would work on first. The desk was a gift from Oxenstierna’s younger brother from a bygone era, and he chose to work
Figure 3.1 Skenäs. Lithograph by F. Richard, early 1800s. From Herrgårdar uti Södermanland (1869). Source: Uppsala University Library.
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 75 on a funeral poem written for a friend from his youth, Baron Samuel Olof Tilas. The table itself represented for Oxenstierna a coffin in the form of a desk that would awaken his thoughts to sorrowful images.74 The rooms in which Oxenstierna had spent some of the happiest times of his life, absorbed in work (either on his studies or in writing poems) and certain objects (the paper on which he had written the poems he was about to work on and the desk that was a gift from a brother) linked emotions and identity to material objects, to the spatiality of home and to Oxenstierna’s contemplation of his literary work when he felt himself aging. In Oxenstierna’s diary, work and routines of old age are enlightened through his relationship with three close relatives: his grandmother Margareta Eleonora von Beijer, who was old when he was writing his youthful diaries; his aging father, Göran Gabrielsson Oxenstierna, in the diary of 1780 and his mother, Sara Gyllenborg, in the diary of 1805. For the adolescent Oxenstierna, the relationship with his grandmother was warm and emotional, every separation a possibility for eternal loss through the potential death of the grandmother.75 However, the daily routines of country-house life and old age shaped Oxenstierna’s days when in Skenäs in summer 1805. He wished to spend as much time with his mother as possible, since she had aged physically, even though not mentally.76 Skenäs was owned and inhabited by Oxenstierna’s cousin, Jan Henning Gyllenborg and his wife Albertina von Axelson, and everyday life was largely structured by family. Oxenstierna divided his time mainly between his mother, the Gyllenborg family, his son Gösta and his nephew Erik who accompanied Oxenstierna to Skenäs. With the boys, Oxenstierna read in French, played in the garden, swam and took long walks. He also spent time reading and writing and making handicrafts with Albertina von Axelson. Gösta did some needlework too and played the clavier for hours—an accomplishment of which both he and his father were particularly proud.77 Sara Gyllenborg seems to have given up ordinary meals if there were no guests in Skenäs, because Oxenstierna ate bread with her after midday, and drank coffee in the afternoon and tea in the evening, but he also ate both lunch and dinner with his cousin Jan Henning and his wife Albertina. Oxenstierna spent the evenings with the small boys, reading and taking walks, until they went to bed at eleven o’clock in the evening. After that, Oxenstierna often worked on his diary and writings until past midnight. Oxenstierna had hoped for time to work on his poetry and his collected works during his stay at Skenäs, but the daily life of the family did not allow him any longer period of time to work in solitude. Moreover, because of many guests at the country house, Oxenstierna could not find peace to work in his rooms, and he complained to his wife a few days
76 Johanna Ilmakunnas before leaving Skenäs in August 1805 that the only quiet place to write was an attic room in the main building. On the way back to Stockholm, he and the boys stayed in Mariefred, where Oxenstierna had sojourned long periods during his court career at the Gripsholm Castle, a renaissance palace and one of the favourite royal palaces of Gustav III. Oxenstierna sat late in the evening alone in his room; he felt old and heavy but satisfied for being a poet.78
Conclusions Taking a microhistory approach to Oxenstierna’s life and work gives a tangible illustration of the complexity of work-related activities and their meanings in the daily lives of eighteenth-century elites.79 Looking closely at a person’s life, its continuities and changes, routines and ruptures, display the complexity of work as an analytical concept and the entanglement of work-related activities within a social group that are less often regarded by earlier scholarship as working. Aristocrats were socialised to work from an early stage: Oxenstierna’s adolescence was characterised by studies and letter-writing, both of which he described as work in his diary. Studies honed adolescent noblemen for their future careers whether in the army or administration. Letter-writing was an indispensable part of elite lifestyle, and parts of it, such as letters about family affairs and those carrying New Years’ wishes, belong to kin work, performed both by men and by women. Extensive letter-writing was also part of work in diplomacy, the army, state and court administration and in literary and scientific work, as Oxenstierna’s duties in copying and ciphering diplomatic correspondence in the Swedish embassy in Vienna 1770–71 clearly demonstrate. Many work-related activities continued from childhood to old age, even though they changed from being chores to being learned to activities performed out of personal and social interest or duty. Handiwork was an essentially feminine chore, learned by all daughters of the elites, yet Oxenstierna was typical of many noblemen in learning woodturning and textile crafts in his adolescence and in maintaining these interests into old age, engaging in embroidery with female family members. Handicrafts were an occupation that could be carried on alone or in company, from childhood to old age. While handiwork could be an agonising duty or a refined feminine accomplishment, for Oxenstierna it offered mental satisfaction and tangible routines through manual work. Another occupation that could be carried out alone or in company across one’s life-cycle was gardening, which again belonged to the category of everyday work that Oxenstierna enjoyed extensively in his youth. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna had a long career in state administration and at court that formed his most obvious form of work. However, the occupation that Oxenstierna most wished to do—and yet also described
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 77 as work—was writing and reading. For him, work meant a number of activities, both dutiful and pleasurable: only some were linked to making a living, others being linked to self-cultivation and serving one’s family and country. When extending the concept of work to include intellectual and artistic activities and recognising that leisure could be both work and a duty, daily routines and the rationality of early modern aristocracy’s lifestyle can be better understood. Work continuously moulded the daily routines and identities of aristocrats. Certain forms of work, such as careers in the army or in administration, were life-cycle or gender specific; others, such as estate management, literary work, handiwork, work of kin and work of leisure, continued into old age and shaped daily activities and identities of elites throughout their lives.
Notes 1. Micaela di Leonardo, ‘The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship’, Signs 12 (1987): 440–53; Mimi Hellman, ‘Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 32 (1999): 415–45; Dave Sinardet and Dimitri Mortelmans, ‘The Feminine Side to Santa Claus: Women’s Work of Kinship in Contemporary Gift-Giving Relations’, The Social Science Journal 46 (2009): 124–42; Maria Ågren, ed., Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Johanna Ilmakunnas, ‘Konsten att avbilda arbete: Kvinnors sysselsättningar och vardag på Pehr Hilleströms genremålningar från 1770-talet till 1810-talet’, Historisk Tidskrift för Finland 103, no. 1 (2018): 1–45; Jane Whittle, ‘ “A Critique of Approaches to ‘Domestic Work’: Women, Work and the Pre-Industrial Economy”,’ Past & Present 243, no. 1 (2019): 35–70, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz002. 2. Anna-Maria Åström, ‘Work and Working in the Savolax Manorial Society in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Ethnologia Fennica 30 (2002–2003): 52–62; Henry French and Mark Rothery, Man’s Estate: landed gentry masculinities, c.1660—c.1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Johanna Ilmakunnas, Ett ståndsmässigt liv: Släkten von Fersens livsstil på 1700-talet (Helsingfors and Stockholm: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland & Atlantis, 2012), 87–128. 3. For a discussion on early modern nobility and the concept of work, see Johanna Ilmakunnas, ‘Työn kulttuurihistoriaa esimodernin ajan Euroopassa’, in Menneisyyden rakentajat: Teoriat historiantutkimuksessa, ed. Mirkka Danielsbacka, Matti Hannikainen, and Tuomas Tepora (Helsinki: Gaudeamus Helsinki University Press, 2018), 168–82; see also Jonas Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz and Göran Rydén, ‘The Diversity of Work’, in Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society, ed. Maria Ågren (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 41–52. 4. See, for example, Marie Steinrud, Den dolda offentligheten. Kvinnlighetens sfärer i 1800-talets svenska högreståndskultur (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2008), 136–71; Britta Kägler, Frauen am Münchener Hof (1661–1756) (Kallmünz: Michael Laßleben, 2011); Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben, eds., The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting Across Early Modern Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014); Johanna Ilmakunnas, ‘From Mother to Daughter: Noblewomen in Service at Swedish Royal
78 Johanna Ilmakunnas Court, c. 1740–1820’, in Early Professional Women in Northern Europe, c. 1650–1850, ed. Johanna Ilmakunnas, Marjatta Rahikainen, and Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 69–90; 5. Of important recent scholarship on nuancing the concept of work, see, for example, Ågren, ed., Making a Living, Making a Difference; Whittle, ‘Women, Work and the Pre-Industrial Economy’. 6. For a brief discussion on aristocracy’s engagement on literary, artistic and scientific work, see Ilmakunnas, ‘Työn kulttuurihistoriaa’, 176–77. 7. Hellman, ‘Work of Leisure’; see also Ilmakunnas, ‘Työn kulttuurihistoriaa, 178–79. 8. Ilmakunnas, ‘Työn kulttuurihistoriaa’, 178–79; Steinrud, Den dolda offentligheten: 137–38. 9. For an in-depth discussion on recent scholarship on (women’s) life cycle, see, for example Katie Barclay, Rosalind Carr, Rosen Elliot and Annmarie Hugues, ‘Introduction: Gender and Generations: Women and Life Cycles’, Women’s History Review 20, no. 2 (2011): 175–88, https://doi.org/10.108 0/09612025.2011.556317; see also Jon Stobart, ‘Status, Gender and Life Cycle in the Consumption Practices of the English Elite: The Case of Mary Leigh, 1736–1806’, Social History 40, no. 1 (2015): 82–103, http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/03071022.2014.984963. 10. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108. Swedish National Archives (Riksarkivet, hereafter RA), Stockholm; Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna, Dagboks-anteckningar, åren 1769–1771. Utg. genom Gustaf Stjernström (Uppsala: Svenska litteratursällskapet, 1881); Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna, Journal för året 1780. Utg. av Holger Frykenstedt (Lund: Kleerup, 1967). 11. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna, Journal: Skenäs 1805 (Stockholm: Sällskapet Bokvännerna, 1964). 12. Martin Lamm, Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna: En gustaviansk natursvärmarens lif och dikt (Stockholm: Hugo Geber, 1911), 85. 13. On Oxenstierna’s life and works, see Lamm, Oxenstierna; Gösta Lundström, ‘Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’, Svenskt Biografiskt Lexikon 28, accessed 14 December 2019, https://sok.riksarkivet.se/sbl/artikel/7919; see also Henrik Knif, Leva och låta leva i gamla Europa: Saint-Évremond, Mestastasio, Fredenheim och Oxenstierna (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2010), 171–233. 14. ‘Oxenstierna af Korsholm och Wasa nr 8, Johan Gabriel’, AdelsvapenWiki, accessed 19 February 2020, www.adelsvapen.com/genealogi/Oxen stierna_af_Korsholm_och_Wasa_nr_8. 15. Cf. 11 January 1780. Oxenstierna, Journal för året 1780, 14–15. 16. On the demography of the nobility in early modern Sweden, see Ingvar Elmroth, För kung och fosterland: Studier i den svenska adelns demografi och offentliga funktioner 1600–1900 (Lund: Kleerup, 1981); Kaarlo Wirilander, Herrskapsfolk: Ståndspersoner i Finland 1721–1870 (Stockholm: Nordiska museet, 1982). 17. 1 January 1766. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. ‘Je tracerai le tableau de mes etudes, de mes traveaux et de mes plaisirs’. 18. Johanna Ilmakunnas, ‘Adelns arbete och vardag på 1700-talets svenska herrgårdar: Johan Gabriel Oxenstiernas och Jacobina Charlotta Munsterhjelms dagböcker’, Historisk Tidskrift för Finland 98, no. 2 (2013): 156–84. 19. Lamm, Oxenstierna, 102–3. 20. 12 June, 1768, Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA.
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 79 21. 21 December, 1767, Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 22. Ilmakunnas, ‘Adelns arbete’; Lamm, Oxenstierna, 102–17. 23. Lamm, Oxenstierna, v. 24. See, for example, Stina Hansson, Svensk brevskrivning: Teori och tillämpning (Göteborg: Göteborgs universitet, 1988); Clare Brant, EighteenthCentury Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Willemijn Ruberg, Conventional Correspondence: Epistolary Culture of the Dutch elite 1770–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 25. Leonardo, ‘The Work of Kinship’; Sinardet and Mortelmans, ‘Women’s Work of Kinship’. 26. Ilmakunnas, ‘Adelns arbete’, 180–82. 27. See, for example 1 January 1768, 5 January, 1768. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 28. See, for example 12 September 1766, 6 November 1766, 7 November 1766, 16 November 1766, 17 January 1768, 29 March 1768, 22 August 1768; citation from Journal de l’Annee 1767. 31 May 1767. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. ‘Je finissois l’année passée dans le tour, je commencois celle ci au mem endroit. Jamais personne n’a été plus diligent a ce travail que moi, aussi je n’ai guere fait autre chose pendent tout le tems. Le jour me quittoit dans le touret, il m’y retrouva’. 29. 20 November 1766, 27 November 1766, 7 December 1766. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 30. Johanna Ilmakunnas, ‘Embroidering Women & Turning Men: Handiwork, Gender and Emotions in Sweden and Finland, c. 1720–1820’, Scandinavian Journal of History 41, no. 3 (2016): 306–31, https://doi.org/10.1080/03468 755.2016.1179831. 31. 6 November 1766, November 16, 1766. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 32. 13 March 1766, 17 March 1766, 22 March 1766, 20 April 1766, 13 May 1766, 24 May 1766, 6 June 1766, 14 June 1766. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 33. 5 July 1766. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 34. 31 December1767, 9 January 1768, 24 January 1768, 28 January 1768, 21 February 1768, 26 February 1768, 28 February 1768, 8 March 1768, 13 March 1768. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 35. 17 May 1768, 18 May 1768, 20 May 1768, 24 May 1768, 24 May 1768, 13 July 1768, 14 July 1768, 16 July 1768. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 36. Rainer Knapas, ‘Den nya trädgårdskonsten’, in Signums svenska kulturhistoria: Gustavianska tiden, ed. Jacob Christensson (Stockholm: Signum, 2007), 363–87. 37. Fredrik Thisner, Militärstatens arvegods: Officerstjänstens socialreproduktiva funktion i Sverige och Danmark, ca 1720–1800 (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 2007); Fredrik Thisner, Indelta inkomster: En studie av det militära löneindelningsverket 1721–1833 (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 2014). 38. On the political system in eighteenth-century Sweden, see Charlotta Wolff, Noble Conceptions of Politics in Eighteenth-Century Sweden (ca 1740– 1790) (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2008); Pasi Ihalainen, Michael Brengsbo, Karin Sennefelt, and Patrik Winton, eds., Scandinavia in the Age
80 Johanna Ilmakunnas of Revolution: Nordic Political Cultures, 1740–1820 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). 39. ‘Oxenstierna af Korsholm och Wasa nr 8, Axel Fredrik, Göran Ludvig, Jakob Gustaf’, Adelsvapen-Wiki, accessed 19 February 2020, www.adelsvapen. com/genealogi/Oxenstierna_af_Korsholm_och_Wasa_nr_8. 40. 30 October 1768, 31 November 1768, 4 November 1768, 8 November 1768. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA; Lamm, Oxenstierna, passim; Lundström, ‘Oxenstierna’; Bo Bennich-Björkman, Författaren i ämbetet: Studier i funktion och organisation av författarämbeten vid svenska hovet och kansliet 1550–1850 (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet 1970); Knif, Leva och låta leva, 171–233; Lamm, Oxenstierna, passim. 41. 19 October 1768, 20 October 1768, 24 October 1768, 1 November 1768, 19 November 1768. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 42. See, for example, 6 January 1769, 7 January 1769, 1 February 1769, 23 June 1769, 1 September 1769. Dagboks-anteckningar, 2, 6, 33, 47. 43. 21 June 1769, 20 September 1769. Dagboks-anteckningar, 32, 50. 44. 4 January 1771. Oxenstierna, Dagboks-anteckningar, 142. 45. 8 January 1771. Oxenstierna, Dagboks-anteckningar, 142. 46. See, for example, 1 May 1770, Oxenstierna, Dagboks-anteckningar, 77–78. 47. 2 November 1768. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA. 48. See, for example, 28 July 1769, 1 September 1769, 1 May 1770, 22 April 1771. Oxenstierna, Dagboks-anteckningar, 38, 47, 77, 165. 49. “Oxenstierna,” Adelsvapen-Wiki; Lamm, Oxenstierna, 243–373. 50. On Gustav III and his use of power, see Erik Lönnroth, Den stora rollen: Kung Gustaf III spelad av honom själv (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1986) and Henrika Tandefelt, Konsten att härska: Gustaf III inför sina undersåtar (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 2008); see also Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna, “Mitt minne,” in Svenska memoarer och bref I, ed. Henrik Schück (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers förlag, 1900). 51. Tandefelt, Konsten att härska, 94–95; see also Lamm, Oxenstierna, 299–303. 52. On Oxenstierna’s appointment in royal administration and at court, see “Oxenstierna,” Adelsvapen-Wiki. 53. Lamm, Oxenstierna, 248–49, 271, 299–303. 54. Cf. Lamm, Oxenstierna; see also Martin Lamm, Upplysningstidens romantic: Den mystiskt sentimentala strömningen i svensk litteratur, förra delen (Enskede: Hammarström & Åberg, 1918), 359–88, 412–33; for a list of Oxenstierna’s works, see e.g. Lundström, “Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna.” 55. Lamm, Oxenstierna, passim. 56. See, for example, diary entries for February 1771. Oxenstierna, Dagboksanteckningar, 148–57. 57. Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c. 1754–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 58. 21 January 1769. Oxenstierna, Dagboks-anteckningar, 9–10. 59. See, for example, 18 January 1771, 24 January 1771, 26 January 1771. Oxenstierna, Dagboks-anteckningar, 144–46. 60. 19 February 1780. Oxenstierna, Journal för Året 1780, 45. 61. 21 January 1771, 22 January 1771, Oxenstierna, Dagboks-anteckningar, 144–45. 62. 30 January 1780. Oxenstierna, Journal för Året 1780, 31; on the work and duties of ladies-in-waiting at Swedish court, see Ilmakunnas, ‘From Mother to Daughter’.
Life-Stage, Work and Daily Routines 81 63. See, for example, 6 July 1766, 8 August 1766, 25 September 1766, 29 September 1766, 5 October 1766, 6 October 1766, 9 May 1768. Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna’s journal 1766–1768. Tosterupsamlingen vol. 108, RA; 24 May 1771, 25 May 1771, 30 May 1771, 10 June 1771. Oxenstierna, Dagboksanteckningar, 167–68, 170–72. 64. 11 January 1780, 26 January 1780. Oxenstierna, Journal för Året 1780, 14–15, 26–27. 65. ‘Oxenstierna’, Adelsvapen-Wiki. 66. On attentive and emotional parenthood in the eighteenth century, see Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 67. Lamm, Oxenstierna, 327–28. 68. 15 July 1805, 17 July 1805, 19 July 1805, Oxenstierna, Journal 1805, 26, 28, 30–31. 69. On selling officer’s commissions, se Thisner, Militärstatens Arvegods and Thisner, Indelta inkomster; see also Ilmakunnas, Ett ståndsmässigt liv, 89–110. 70. On the continuum of women’s court careers, see Ilmakunnas, ‘From Mother to Daughter’. 71. See, for example Carl Fredrik Mennander to his son 7 May 1767. Brev från och till C. F. Mennander I (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1939), 47–49. 72. Oxenstierna, Journal 1805, 21. 73. 31 July 1805. Oxenstierna, Journal 1805, 53–57. 74. 16 July 1805. Oxenstierna, Journal 1805, 26–27. 75. See, for example, 11 June 1769, 7 September 1769, 4 August 1771. Oxenstierna, Dagboks-anteckningar, 30–31, 47, 178. 76. 12 July 1805. Oxenstierna, Journal 1805, 24–25. 77. 15 July 1805, 17–21 July 1805, 23 July 1805, 24 July 1805, 2 August 1805, 5 August 1805, 9 August 1805, 10 August 1805, 17 August 1805. Oxenstierna, Journal 1805, 26, 28–29, 31–33, 35, 38–39, 41, 63, 75, 77, 92. 78. 23 August 1805, 24 August 1805. Oxenstierna, Journal 1805, 102, 107–8. 79. On complexity and microhistory cf. Giovanni Levi, ‘Microhistory and the Recovery of Complexity’, in Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, ed. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 125.
4 The Rhythms and Routines of the English Country-House Garden Helen Brown and Jon Stobart
Introduction On 8 May 1796, Thomas Challis, the undergardener at Audley End in Essex, noted in his diary his duties that day: ‘weeding of the Gardin; potted of sum more ten week stocks; sow the white dwarf French beans; sow sum red dwarf French beans; hoing the carrot bed over the first time’.1 Twenty-five years later, Sir Charles Monck, the owner of Belsay Hall in Northumberland, was also making notes in his garden notebook. On 11 August 1819, he recorded that he had ‘gathered a ripe royal George peach off the wall from a tree which has had no fire behind it since spring. It is a very early year for peaches and the crop abundant and fine’.2 Taken from the very different perspectives of owner and undergardener, these two incidents remind us that gardens needed to be carefully nurtured and maintained in order to remain productive and aesthetically pleasing. Large gardens, such as those at Belsay and Audley End, soaked up considerable amounts of capital and labour, yet these aspects of garden history remain largely unexplored, as do the everyday activities of gardeners, owners and visitors. Traditionally, garden history has been dominated by a focus on design and aesthetics, particularly the changing of styles over time and the cultural implications of the landscape movement in the Atlantic world.3 There has been recent research into the use of gardens by the landowners, their families, guests and tourists.4 The balance of work and leisure depended on individual personality, and, while some took great interest in the progress of plants, others appreciated their gardens for their solitude and as a setting of ‘political or philosophical musing’.5 However, the story of the working gardener has been slower to emerge. Jane Brown suggests the reason for this is that history ‘has been written by classically educated minds who have inherited a Greek disdain for menial labour’.6 Unlike the country house itself, the working people out-of-doors have been largely neglected by historians of gardens and of domestic servants, despite the pivotal role gardeners played in provisioning the house. It is surprising that kitchen gardeners, gamekeepers and labourers at the home farm have not been given the
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 83 same treatment as indoor staff when their work to feed the house was vital.7 The head gardener managed a large staff and a large budget and worked closely with the household cook and the butler to provide food for the residents.8 A recent departure from design-based garden history is the approach taken by Roderick Floud, who seeks to write an economic history of the English garden. He examines how the gardens of the wealthy were built and funded, as well as looking at the working lives of ordinary gardeners, the role of nurserymen and the garden as a productive space.9 We seek to build on this approach by aligning it with recent studies of the English country house that have highlighted the everyday and quotidian alongside the dynastic and luxurious, and that have explored both patterns of spending and the routines of everyday life. Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths, for instance, have explored the strategies and practices of household management in the Le Strange family, highlighting in particular gendered divisions of responsibility. Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, meanwhile, focused attention on consumption practices, including processes and patterns of supply and the role of key suppliers in shaping consumption practices, but also on the management of resources and (re)deployment of objects within the house—an approach that also characterises the recent study of middling homes by Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson.10 Our approach seeks to tie the country-house garden into analyses of everyday routines and practices, focusing on the mundane and the repetitious rather than the spectacular. This brings two aspects to the fore. First, we view the garden as part of a system of spending and practical application. In part, our focus is on the economy of the garden, but we are more interested in the rhythms and routines that shaped the garden in terms of inputs (labour, materials and plants/seeds), daily practices and experiences of both workers and owners, and outputs (seen in terms of produce). In this, the chapter focuses in on the garden, but also out onto the wider networks of supply that included nurserymen as suppliers of plants and tools, and to a consideration of the professional relationships that were built up over many years of service. Focusing on the practical and everyday gives us a fuller picture of the processes and practices involved in running a large country-house garden and draws it into the context of domestic routines, not least by foregrounding the kitchen garden. Second, our approach involves drawing on a set of archival records and deploying an analytical approach not common in garden histories. Gardener’s diaries offer a rare insight into the daily tasks and longer-term rhythms of work involved in the maintenance of designed landscapes and the production of foodstuffs, but most of our evidence comes from account books and bills. While these effectively reduce the garden to pounds, shillings and pence, they also lay bare the regular cycles of spending and work that allow us to understand the processes by which the
84 Helen Brown and Jon Stobart garden was created and recreated each year and maintained day-to-day. Qualitative sources bring us closer to the daily experiences of Monck and Challis; quantitative data provide an aggregation of these individual lives and help us to visualise trends over longer time periods. Our approach is temporal, beginning with long-term and annual cycles of activity and spending, moving down through seasonal and monthly/weekly rhythms, before focussing on the everyday.
Long-Term Cycles and Routines of Gardening Gardening inevitably involved an annual cycle, largely dictated by the changing seasons, but there were also longer-term cycles and rhythms, shaped more by humans than nature. One of these cycles was marked by the drawing up of consolidated accounts, which formed part of the annual routine of reckoning up the estate accounts from daybooks. At Arbury Hall in Warwickshire, the accounts are particularly complete and detailed for a period stretching from 1747 to 1796. They provide insights into the way in which the garden was conceived by Sir Roger Newdigate (and other landowners) as a production system, the accounts recording inputs of labour and materials.11 Comparing them over the years provides an idea of the long-term rhythms of this system and how it changed in response to life cycle and developments in the wider economy of the estate. The garden accounts at Arbury Hall are organised under three headings: wages, implements and nurserymen/seedsmen. Wages formed by far the largest element of spending and included those of the gardener and undergardener, plus the payments made to an unspecified number of unnamed labourers, some of whom were employed on a seasonal basis. There was clearly considerable need for labour in the garden, as these generally accounted for three-quarters of the overall wage bill despite labourers’ wages being perhaps one-fifth of those paid to the gardener. The heading ‘implements’ encompassed spending on a wide range of hardware and infrastructure, but the most frequent items were flower pots and garden tools such as rakes, spades and forks—the supplier of which is invariably noted in the accounts. In the 1760s, for instance, Francis Ward, listed as potter, received regular payments, and there were one-off purchases of scythes from Thomas Griffin and chairs from J. Poulton. The same is true of seeds and plants, with between two and five nurserymen or seedsmen being listed each year, sometimes with a note on the specific kind of plant being supplied, as with the ‘pine plants’ supplied by Fearne and Thatcher in 1777 at a hefty cost of £10 7s.12 The accounts thus summarise the flows into the garden as a space and as an economy, allowing us to imagine the garden in a very different way. Tracking how these inputs changed over the years reveals a number of important rhythms and trends. First and foremost is the growth
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 85 in spending on the gardens at Arbury, rising from an average of about £74 per annum in the 1740s to over £162 per annum by the 1790s. This was partly a result of inflation in the cost of materials and in wages, the gardener for example receiving £16 in 1750, £22 in 1770 and £25 in 1790, but it also reflected Newdigate’s increasing ability and willingness to spend on his garden as part of his wider estate as his income rose markedly in the second half of the eighteenth century. It seems likely that his gardens grew in size, although there is no evidence of major works resulting from redesign or the laying out of new areas.13 Of more particular interest to our present argument, there was a longer rhythm or cycle to the inputs into the garden, most obviously in terms of the personnel involved (Figure 4.1). Newdigate was never dependent upon a single seedsman or nurseryman, but he clearly had favoured suppliers to whom he returned year on year, building up a trusting relationship with them.14 Some of these key suppliers were drawn upon for a decade or more (including John Whittingham of Coventry and Fearne and Thatcher of Fleet Street, London), while others appear more fleetingly (Webb and Powell). The exact nature of the seeds and plants being bought and the reasons for transferring between suppliers are not written in the accounts. With the former, there is no obvious distinction between local and London suppliers, both featuring amongst the long-term suppliers. The latter appears to reflect the life cycle or business life cycle of the nurserymen and the choice of Newdigate himself—certainly, there is no clear temporal relationship between the identity of the gardener and that of key suppliers, indicating that he had little say in choosing which nurserymen to patronise. The turnover of gardeners and undergardeners, by contrast, appears to have been more closely linked. Unsurprisingly, the former were in post for longer—an average of 6.25 years as opposed to 4 years—the slower rhythm of change reflecting their higher standing, wages and level of responsibility. The point of transition from one incumbent to the next coincided on only two occasions, both occurring when the undergardener was promoted to the position of gardener: James Newbold in 1756 and Thomas Phillips in 1770. In these instances, there was considerable long-term stability in the Arbury gardens—Newbold was there for a total of nineteen years and Phillips for thirteen years—but the overlap of gardeners and undergardeners ensured a more general continuity in localised knowledge. This undoubtedly served the owner’s needs by providing stability and the equivalent of institutional memory, and it seems that the short tenures of Smith, Lowe and Hinckley in the 1770s and 1780s were exceptional, both in terms of the other gardeners and Newdigate’s senior servants: his stewards serving him for an average of a little over seven years each during the same period. At Belsay Hall in Northumberland, a similar annual rhythm was imposed upon the gardens by the payment of bills to garden suppliers.
86 Helen Brown and Jon Stobart Year
1750
Head Gardener Samuel Deadman
William Goldby 1755
Under Gardener Richard Pawley
James Newbold
Gray
James Newbold James Kelsey
1760
Key Suppliers
Gray
Joseph Watson Powell
1765
Webb
Thomas Phillips 1770
1775
Thomas Phillips
John Smith 1780
1785
William Love Jonathan Hinckley
Thomas Hardy
Fearne
Whittingham James Wagstaff
J. Coleman Williamson
Thomas Knight W Whersay
1790
1795
George Colley
Williamson
Fearne & Thatcher
Thatcher
Whittingham
Charles Palmer
W. Wadam
Figure 4.1 Turnover of gardeners, undergardeners and key suppliers at Arbury Hall, 1747–96. Source: WRO, CR136/V/156, Accounts, 1747–62, CR136/V/136, Accounts, 1763–96.
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 87 The owner, Sir Charles Monck, settled his account with his nurserymen early in the calendar year, marking the start of a new period of garden productivity. Cash books for the first thirty years of the nineteenth century provide annual records of payments to three northern nurserymen: Dickson, Elliot, and Messrs Falla and Co.15 Up to 1810, half of Monck’s nursery expenditure was with Falla, and the other half was split relatively equally between Dickson and Elliott, but again there is little detail in the accounts on who supplied what kinds of seeds and plants. From 1811, Falla became the sole supplier to the gardens at Belsay—a monopoly never enjoyed by suppliers to Arbury Hall—suggesting that he was able to supply all of Monck’s requirements for commercially sourced plants. Looking at records over an extended timeframe distinguishes years of major activity from those in which only basic maintenance was required to keep the gardens in a healthy and presentable condition. The years 1811 to 1815 were some of the most transformative in the development of Belsay’s gardens as we see them today. At the height of the building project, in which a quarry garden was cut into the landscape and planted with hundreds of native and exotic species, over £95 a year was laid out on nursery goods alone. During the preceding and following years, Monck spent an annual average of around £24 on plants and seeds—still about twice the figure laid out by Newdigate at Arbury Hall—although year-on-year expenditure varied considerably. This reflected the particular challenges of harsh seasons or unfavourable weather that required plants to be replaced but also wider market fluctuations in the price of seeds, roots and plants. Whilst breakdowns of these annual bills have not survived in Belsay’s records, a catalogue from William Falla’s nursery for 1816–17 demonstrates the changeability of prices for plants: while the list of plants is printed, the year and the prices are handwritten in pen, with some plants presumably unavailable, as no price is given.16 This reflects the competitive and changeable nature of the Georgian nursery trade, in which prices and costs were rarely stable year-on-year.17 It meant that the annual rhythm of spending was by no means consistent and that the financing of gardens year-to-year could be unpredictable even if the gardener’s requirements remained broadly the same. The family at Belsay enjoyed an even greater level of continuity of suppliers than was seen at Arbury Hall. Monck’s father Sir William Middleton purchased farm and garden seeds and quicks from the most prominent local nursery at the time, Callender’s in Gateshead and Newcastle from 1751–98.18 When the Callender’s business began to show money troubles and eventually went bankrupt in 1810, William Falla became the largest nursery in the area, even inheriting some of Callender’s property.19 Monck then remained with Falla’s nursery for at least forty years. In this aspect of garden upkeep, there was a slow rhythm of change, but it was a rather different story for the labour that went into the upkeep of Belsay’s gardens. Data from labourer’s day books offer an indication
88 Helen Brown and Jon Stobart of the turnover of garden labourers at the property. While some men are present in the records in the 1810s and were still working at the property by 1839, most stayed for much shorter periods of time.20 Between 1827 and 1839, fifty individuals are recorded, of whom only nine stayed for more than five years. Some continuity from year-to-year was possible in these circumstances, though it was typical for gardeners to move around the country, and local labourers often came in and out of the service of a country estate through their lives, so a mobile workforce was expected.21 The annual cycle was also connected directly to the garden and its plants. Sir Charles Monck kept regular records of the progress of flowers and fruit in his garden for many years, a routine that enabled him to directly compare the current year or season to those before it. Scarlet Strawberries, for example, were first served at his table on 1 July in 1815, but in 1819, of which he noted that ‘the old people do not recollect such a season for 30 years’, the strawberries were ‘scarcely ripe’ in July.22 He could also track the development of plants throughout the year. Writing of his Royal George peach trees, he noted in August 1819 that he had gathered an ‘abundant and fine’ crop that lasted until October. In February the process of pruning the trees was completed, and they began to blossom in March; April saw them turn from full flower to the beginnings of fruit ‘the size of hazelnuts’. The first ripe peach of 1820 was harvested near the end of July. Growing food required patience, and its limited seasonal availability could be something to look forward to; however, there was also a financial element that should not be overlooked. Monck was passionate about his gardens and was proud of what his staff were able to produce, but he was also the financer of the estate, and it was important that the large payments that went towards the building and running of his large gardens were efficiently managed. After planting twenty-one peach and pear trees in August 1827, Monck inspected each new plant a month later, and he was only confident that three of the plants had definitely ‘taken’ to their new location and would survive. A further nine appeared to have taken, but their health and potential success was uncertain, and eight had already died.23 This was not only frustrating from a horticultural perspective for a man deeply interested in growing food in his gardens, but it was also damaging financially. While eight dead fruit trees were not a serious hit to Monck’s finances, a 40 per cent loss on trees that can produce fruit for several years was a disappointing result. Yet failure was a central factor of gardening, which makes its financing very different from that of furnishing the interior of a country house—it was highly unlikely that 40 per cent of chairs purchased would be broken beyond repair in the first month of use. Keeping gardens remains inherently unpredictable as weather, pests and disease all operate outside of human control, though over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, horticulturalists and landowners alike became increasingly interested in their ability to control nature to increase productivity of their land.24
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 89 Monck was not only attentive to the annual rhythms of growing fruit and other foods, he also recorded much longer processes and investments, particularly the progress of trees. He began measuring trees and shrubs at Belsay in 1807 and recorded their progress in 1826, 1850 and 1865, and his successor continued to measure them throughout the nineteenth century.25 The planting of decorative trees, such as Monck’s elms, oaks and limes, was a long-term contribution to the look and feel of a property, and garden designs needed time to mature and reach their aesthetic potential. For owners and designers, then, there was a rhythm to gardening that stretched over the years and even over generations. This long-term perspective was broken into annual cycles, in part driven by the seasons but also imposed by landowners through their annual accounting of funds to settle nurserymen’s bills or pay workers’ wages. Economics were thus overlain on aesthetics and the cultural capital of a fashionable garden, specimen trees or exotics for the dinner table. Their relative importance was determined by the priorities of the owner: both Monck and Newdigate placed value on both productivity and aesthetics, but Monck’s interest in exotic plants was greater, and he invested accordingly. How far into the future an individual might look depended on their role in the garden. Whereas a head gardener such as Newbold might expect to see the garden develop over several years or evens decades, a trainee like Knight or Challis would probably only encounter a garden for a year or two before moving on. The long-term processes that were of interest to a head gardener or the owner were thus less important than the seasonal or daily tasks to be completed. The rhythms and routines of the garden were thus contingent on status and control.
Structuring the Year: Seasons, Months, Weeks As we have already seen, the gardening year was naturally broken into seasons. If the purchase of plants and seeds varied year-on-year, it certainly reflected an annual cycle of planting and sowing. Bills from nurserymen were often consolidated, reflecting months and sometimes a year or more of spending; but they carefully itemised what had been bought on particular days, which gives us the opportunity to explore the seasonality of spending and planting. Fairly typical are the two bills presented by the seedsman S. Harris to Edward, Lord Leigh, in 1738 and 1739, detailing a large quantity of seeds supplied for the kitchen garden at Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire.26 Between October 1736 and April 1738, Harris supplied seeds on 32 separate occasions. He sent 70 different kinds of seeds, ranging from nasturtiums to onions and from radishes to cucumbers; there were 9 varieties of lettuce, 8 kinds of pea, 6 types of cabbage, 6 of bean and 3 of beet—a number that might seem remarkable but reflected the need for precautions against the failure of a single crop and
90 Helen Brown and Jon Stobart 70 60 50 40 30
20 10 0
cost - shillings
no of items
Figure 4.2 Seeds and plants supplied to Stoneleigh Abbey by S. Harris, 1737–38 (cost and number of items per month). Source: SCLA, DR18/5/2048—receipted bill from S Harris; DR18/5/2272—receipted bill from S Harris.
the varied eating qualities of each type. Equally striking is the concentration of these orders into just three months: January, February and March accounted for 85 per cent of items and 84 per cent of the total spending for 1737 (Figure 4.2).27 This peak in late winter and early spring related directly to the planting season, although it is unclear whether all of the seeds were sown immediately upon arrival. On the one hand, the amount of labour that this would require makes it more likely that the work was spread out over several weeks—a practice that would also spread the time at which the plants became ready for harvesting. On the other hand, internal evidence in the bill suggests that sowing probably took place in a fairly compressed timeframe. There were further orders of the same seeds within and following this peak period, presumably because the initial supply was running low: carrot seeds, for example, were received on 11 January, 28 January and 14 February, whilst broccoli seeds came on 28 January, 4 March and 25 March. Sequential planting was reinforced by the use of different varieties: the various types of lettuce, peas, cabbages and so on would have provided variety in taste and texture but also in the rate of growth and fruition. Whatever the specific timescale of planting, the seasonality of this work is quite clear: the gardener and his staff would have been kept extremely busy sorting, sowing and perhaps pricking out seedlings. Such rhythms are also apparent at Audley End in the early nineteenth century as demonstrated in a similar bill from John Mackie’s nursery in
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 91 Norwich.28 This bill was settled in July 1818 and has a breakdown of the costs and amounts of seeds, roots and young plants ordered since July 1817, mostly for the 1.05 hectare kitchen garden. Three-quarters of this £37 11s. 1d. bill was ordered in the winter months, between November and January, and the single largest order was in December, which accounted for a third of the total annual bill. Fruit trees and bushes such as plums, apples, gooseberries and currants of several different varieties were ordered in November in time for their optimal winter planting. In December and January, the majority of seeds were for root vegetables, particularly turnips, beets, parsnips, onions and celeriac to be harvested the following winter. Planting multiple varieties of the same fruit and vegetables was—and remains—a system that helped home kitchen gardens to manage the unpredictability of fruition. If the head gardener only ordered one variety and it did not have a successful year, there would be no produce for the house. As at Stoneleigh Abbey, therefore, ordering several different types of pea practically guaranteed the kitchens at Audley End would have peas throughout the season. The seasons determined when spending was required and when certain work was required in the kitchen gardens at large properties. Winter work was characterised not only by sowing seeds but also by the preparation of the land beforehand and the construction of hotbeds and subsequent filling with dung for the latest crop of tender plants. Seasonal variations in buying and planting seeds was naturally mirrored by a corresponding seasonality in harvesting the produce. A measure of this can be gained from the ‘Account of Sundry’s Receivd from Stoneleigh Abbey’, kept by Mary Leigh at her suburban villa in Kensington Gore, London.29 She had acquired Grove House in 1788, after gaining a life interest in Stoneleigh Abbey following the death of her brother two years earlier. From then until her death in 1806, she lived in this suburban villa for much of the year, spending only the summer months at Stoneleigh and some of the autumn at Cheltenham.30 The villa had extensive gardens and further land on which she kept some cattle, both of which were part of the attraction that the property held for Mary Leigh.31 However, there was a steady flow of food sent up from the country, comprising game from the estate, meat and poultry probably from the home farm, and fruit and vegetables from the garden. The first and last of these had a distinct seasonal rhythm: game dominated the consignments despatched during the winter months, while garden produce was predominant in the spring and early summer. The way in which the garden produce is recorded in the account book makes it difficult to quantify the full range of goods. Numbers are given of the various fruits despatched from Stoneleigh (cucumbers, melons, peaches and pineapples), but vegetables are merely named rather than enumerated (French beans, peas, potatoes, mushrooms and, on one occasion, lettuce). Nonetheless, it is possible to track seasonal changes
92 Helen Brown and Jon Stobart 140
120 100 80 60 40 20 0
cucumbers
peaches
melons
pineapples
Figure 4.3 Fruit despatched from Stoneleigh Abbey to Grove House, 1794–97 (cumulative monthly totals, averaged over four years). Source: SCLA, DR18/31/655 Account of Sundries from Stoneleigh Abbey, 1793–98.
in two ways. First, the quantities of fruit paint a clear picture of seasonal supply (see Figure 4.3). Cucumbers were clearly being grown under glass and probably in hot beds in order that they could fruit and ripen as early as February; their peak in April–June then indicates the main crop of the year. Melons were grown in a similar way but only came to fruition in June, whilst peaches, grown outdoors against warming brick walls, were starting to fruit in May before peaking in June. Pineapples, by contrast, were fruiting much later in the year, with a peak in December. Second and linked to this, the contents of a typical consignment changed over the course of the year: in March it contained cucumbers, French beans, flowers and perhaps mushrooms; by May there were also peas, potatoes and usually peaches and melons, and when Mary Leigh returned to Grove House in November or December she could expect only French beans and the occasional pineapple. As striking as these seasonal changes was the sheer quantity of fruit being sent up to Grove House, including well over 100 cucumbers per month through April, May and June. There is no record how all of these were consumed, though some were given as gifts to friends in London, along with melons, pineapples and even French beans.32
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 93 The seasonality of planting and harvesting was reflected in the engagement of labour in the garden. Gardeners and undergardeners were employed year-round, as were some wage labourers, but there was a need for additional labour during the spring and autumn. Monthly payments to labourers at Belsay Hall were recorded in the general cash books as lump sums.33 Although these do not tell us about how many people were working, they do reveal some interesting seasonal patterns (Figure 4.4). The smallest payments were made in December when little was growing in the pleasure ground and the leaves of any deciduous trees had already fallen and been cleared away in previous months. Gardens generally require the least amount of labour to keep them tidy in the winter, and the focus is more on preparing the space for spring planting and regrowth. This is reflected in the accounts as there was a gradual increase of spending through the spring and into the summer months. The gardens were at their most active in the summer with the family being in residence and the weather attracting the use of the gardens for outdoor recreational activities. Further, separate payments were made to a separate account exclusively for ‘mowing’ at the end of each summer for an average of £24 from 1809–11. From 1811 to 1815, Belsay’s gardens were drastically remodelled, the majority of work being carried out during the winter months when the family were in London and would not be disturbed. This seasonality is also apparent in the accounts for Audley End in Essex, where an extra 20s. was paid to each of the male labourers in September 1786 for their help with the grain harvest.34 On other receipts of payments in the same year, the kitchen gardeners and pleasure-ground workers were recorded as separate departments, although their daily rates were similar. In this case, however, the additional payment was made to both sets of labourers, indicating that the routine of harvest was a time 12000
Amount in d
10000 8000 6000 4000 2000 Mar 4th Apr 1st Apr 29th May 27th Jun 24th Jul 22nd Aug 19th Sep 16th Oct 14th Nov 11th Dec 9th Jan 6th Feb 3rd Mar 3rd Mar 3rd Mar 31st Apr 28th May 26th Jun 23rd Jul 21st Aug 18th Sep 15th Oct 13th Nov 10th Dec 8th Jan 5th Feb 2nd Mar 2nd Mar 30th Apr 27th May 25th Jun 22nd Jul 20th Aug 17th Sep 14th
0
Date of payment
Figure 4.4 Monthly payments to labourers at Belsay Hall March 1809–September 1811. Source: NRO, ZMI/B36/20, Cash Book no. 6, 1809–1815.
94 Helen Brown and Jon Stobart when everyone came together to get the biggest seasonal task completed in time. Such documents therefore help to highlight a seasonality of work and spending, and reveal something of the way in which labourers experienced both their work in Audley End’s large gardens and their remuneration. They took home their wages monthly and so, although the nature of the work was determined by the seasons, their labour was also experienced with a monthly financial rhythm. Moreover, different rates of pay, even within these wage labourers, demonstrate a hierarchy within the garden teams. John Bitton was paid the most at 1s. 6d. per day, Peter Robinson was paid 1s. 4d. and the rest of the adult male labourers were paid 1s. 2d.; younger boys and women were paid considerably less than this. Large productive gardens also required more specialised maintenance from other craftsmen whose bills were often settled monthly. Estate vouchers in the archives for Audley End show that there was continuous work done alongside the gardeners by bricklayers, glaziers, and blacksmiths. In 1818, these craftsmen worked almost every month on garden buildings, tools and other infrastructure.35 The high level of productivity, particularly in the kitchen garden, meant that repairs and replacements were a perpetual element of garden expenditure. Some jobs were relatively small and were required infrequently: the blacksmith, for example, only being needed for repairs to a spade and a fork in the course of 1818.36 In contrast, Robert Bunten, the glazier, invoiced the Audley End estate for work to the garden seven times in the same year, mostly to replace broken glass or to paint frames of the cucumber lights, pine pits, the hot house and the main greenhouses. Glass became an increasingly widespread material in kitchen gardens through the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth as it became cheaper and easier to produce and eventually created colossal structures like the Crystal Palace in 1851.37 Less frequently, larger, structural projects were undertaken. Mr Ward, the bricklayer, amongst other tasks for February all over the estate, was tasked with building walls to the front and end of the mushroom house and working on the engine that heated other areas of the garden, costing £10 13s. 6d., a third of the monthly bill. As Ward’s bill indicates, much of this work took place during the winter months, giving it a different annual cycle to that of the gardens themselves; but the seasons placed a rhythm on his work just as it did for the labourers such as Bitton and Johnson. The routines of garden work thus changed over the course of the year, following a pattern that was anticipated in the purchase of seeds and young plants and subsequently enjoyed in the form of the garden’s produce. Set within this were the daily work patterns and experiences of gardeners and owners.
A Day in the Garden: Routine Practices Daily routines are perhaps the most difficult to bring into sharp focus, in part because accounts and bills tend to elide the days into longer time
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 95 periods. However, it is sometimes possible to drill down to the day-today tasks being carried out by craftsmen, such as those working at Audley End. The monthly bills recorded for bricklayer’s work were broken down to the weeks in which the labour was performed, details of the work done and how many days men were employed on the task. This precision underpinned the veracity of the bill; it also reveals the range of maintenance required for a garden from the building of infrastructure such as new growing pits or a cistern to take water from the river to the kitchen garden, to more mundane tasks such as whitewashing walls and plastering.38 Although the everyday aspects of the bricklayers’ work, such as whitewashing, might not seem very interesting compared to the bigger projects, it was vital to keeping the gardens in a healthy condition. Whitewashing coated and sealed raw surfaces, keeping out pests and preventing mildew formation. Some work only required one labourer for a single day, such as the fixing of a stone for a pine pit on 28 March 1818, but in July the same year it took seven men nearly three weeks to install a new water system.39 Work in the garden also formed part of the cycle of regular maintenance and repairs undertaken for Mary Leigh at Grove House. There was a particular burst of activity in the summer and autumn of 1795, during which Joseph Naylor was paid for painting in olive green a variety of garden equipment, including four garden lights, tubs, barrows, covers for the garden frames and the handles of two garden rollers. These were ‘twice done’, suggesting that the work was probably carried out over two days.40 More detail of the day-to-day programme of maintenance in the garden is apparent from the bill presented by the carpenter, James Fisher, which itemised work undertaken each week, probably by a team of workmen employed by Fisher.41 The bill does not specify the day on which the work was completed, but it is possible to identify six distinct projects in a little over a month, from late August to early October, each of which reflected a day’s work for one or two workmen. These comprised: repairs to the garden gate and a cucumber frame; ‘preparing and setting gate posts and hanging gates at the bottom of the garden’ and ‘easing’ the garden gates; making a cucumber frame; putting up a shelf in the garden house, repairing posts and railings in the garden and easing garden gates and further maintenance on cucumber frames. This mix of making, maintaining and mending is repeated for the work carried out by Fisher in the house and service buildings. As at Audley End, much of the work of craftsmen was focused on the mundane and routine rather than the grandiose. The bills also show the hustle and bustle of large gardens in which gardeners and various craftsmen were constantly at work on one project or another. They also counter the narrative of gardens being a wholly relaxing space.42 Owners may have been able to enjoy leisure in their gardens, as David Coffin argues, but for working people this was a place of busy production and, due to the consistent presence
96 Helen Brown and Jon Stobart of bricklayers, glaziers and gardeners with their tools and materials, a potentially stressful environment. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that Fisher and Naylor were busiest when Mary Leigh was away from Grove House. In all gardens, the work of craftsmen complemented the daily labour and craft of the gardener, undergardener and labourers. We have little information on the day-to-day work undertaken by the gardener at Grove House, but at least one element of the weekly work of his counterpart at Stoneleigh Abbey is apparent. The produce sent to Kensington was despatched in regular weekly consignments, always recorded in the accounts as arriving on Wednesday—a pattern that was maintained over the whole period covered by the account book. We do not know the route by which the goods were transported, but carriers left Coventry for London every evening, the journey taking around two days.43 There must therefore have been a burst of intensive activity on Saturdays or more likely Mondays as the gardener—perhaps assisted by the undergardener or a labourer—harvested cucumbers, beans, peas, potatoes, flowers, mushrooms and sometimes melons and peaches. These would then need to be carefully packed and taken into town to be loaded onto the carrier’s wagon. Such busyness can be implied from accounts, but it is through ego documents that everyday life and routines are revealed most fully. Gardeners’ diaries survive in some number for the Victorian period but are much rarer for earlier times.44 This makes the journal of Thomas Challis at Audley End especially important as a source of the day-to-day work being undertaken in the Georgian garden. It was typical for a gardener-in-training, as Challis was when he worked at Audley End, to record his daily working activities.45 After a year or so in the kitchen garden, Challis’ diary would have been a useful resource for him to learn the times of year that certain plants required pruning, planting or harvesting and how long crops in the kitchen garden took to grow. Carrots sown in March 1797 and harvested in November mirrored the timings of the previous year (February to October). He recorded his daily activity in a short statement such as on 6 March 1797: ‘sow the crop of onion seed’ or on 15 April 1797 ‘set sum cuttings of green house plants at the end of one of the melon frames’.46 There are periods in his work that were highly repetitive, for example in February 1796 he was nailing fruit trees fifteen days out of the twentyfive working days that month.47 In October 1797, Challis spent most of the month of October gathering apples from the many apple trees at the property, and the potato crop of that year took three months to be fully harvested between other tasks. This highlights the sheer scale of the operation in Audley End’s kitchen gardens at the end of the eighteenth century but also the routinised nature of much of the work. Despite seeming repetitive when looking at a short time frame, Challis’ time at Audley End introduced him to a great variety of tasks: the
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 97 mundane and everyday built into something larger over the course of the weeks and months. Much like the accounts of vegetables delivered to Grove House from the gardens at Stoneleigh Abbey, Challis’ diary highlights the range and scale of food growing in eighteenth-century kitchen gardens. Although the majority of his work was sowing and harvesting, he dealt with many different kinds of fruit, vegetable and herb, all of which had their own techniques and signs of success or failure of which a gardener needed to be aware. In 1796, he worked with over fifty different kinds of foods, not including the flowers that were also grown in the kitchen garden for display in the house. This demanded a great deal of knowledge of each species and variety, all of which he was learning under the supervision of more experienced gardeners in this early stage of his career. The routines of gardening were thus dependent on life cycle—or perhaps more correctly career cycle. This formative period enriched Challis’s understanding of gardening, and he would have taken this knowledge with him throughout the rest of his career, which included work at nurseries and eventually as a head gardener. Further, he worked in a number of different settings within the kitchen garden, each with its own climatic conditions. Much was grown outside in the ground or against the walls of the garden, but he also cultivated produce in the green house, mushroom house, hothouse and rose house and used hand glasses to grow melons and cucumbers. Challis occasionally worked outside of the walled kitchen garden in busy seasonal periods, such as to help with mowing lawns in summer, filling the icehouse in winter and helping to ‘load the wagon’ for the family to move to London. Despite the family not being in residence, Challis’s workload did not lessen; the work of preparing the land and maintaining plants continued regardless. Read as an example of its genre, Challis’s diary thus records the laying of foundations of his career as a gardener; broken down into a series of daily entries, it highlights both the variety of tasks that made up his daily life and the routine nature of much of his work. At the other end of the social hierarchy, Sir Charles Monck was a keen chronicler of the daily activity of his gardens at Belsay. In many ways, his daily experiences and concerns were very different from those of Challis. Perhaps most notably, he observed from his position as a consumer of garden produce, noting things such as the ripening of sweet china oranges in January 1820 (they were ‘well flavoured’) and the arrival of home-grown asparagus at the dinner table in April of the same year. He was interested in the quality of the produce but also the circumstances under which they were grown, commenting in June 1817 on a lemon he gathered ‘from a standard tree growing in bed of conservatory with glass roof in the garden’, which weighed ‘one pound . . . and measured 6 ½ inches long and 10 ½ inches round’, a sizeable fruit indeed.48 As we noted earlier, his diary keeping also included observations on the health of plants and the growth of trees and shrubs. Clearly, Monck was busy in
98 Helen Brown and Jon Stobart the garden on most days when he was resident at Belsay, but his perspective was markedly different from that of his gardeners, as his labour in the garden was leisured and enjoyable and, importantly, his choice. Rebecca Bushnell explains that it is not always a simple dichotomy of the gentleman designer who enjoyed the garden at his pleasure and the labourers ‘who executed and maintained it’.49 Some gentlemen and their family members were passionate about cultivating fruit and flowers themselves rather than relying on their staff because it could be rewarding and enjoyable and was ‘relatively easy work’.50 Monck was not a typical example of a gentleman who enjoyed gardens. He recorded his advice and musings both publicly and privately: from his ‘Plan for transplanting large forest trees in parks’ published in the Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London, to his recipe for killing worms with walnut leaf tea, recorded in his personal notebook.51 Monck’s experience of the garden was routinised by his daily recording of facts and figures. His position was different from Challis, but the experience of writing and perhaps its purpose were not too different: both aimed to benefit in the long-term from the daily task of recording their observations and activities in the garden. Both men’s diary keeping could be used to track the yearly cycles of growth and planting. However, where Challis writes in simple statements, Monck’s entries more overtly exhibit emotions of excitement and pride—an emotional investment that reflects his position as a leisured enthusiast rather than a working gardener.
Conclusions Approaching the country house garden through its temporal rhythms and routines recalibrates our view of how the garden was experienced by a range of people: those whose labour served to create and maintain its productivity and beauty and those who paid the bills and, quite literally, enjoyed the fruits of their investment and other people’s toil. This forms an important corrective to viewing the garden purely in terms of design and aesthetics. By focusing on practices that were repeated dayto-day, season by season, year on year, it also links the country-house garden into histories of the mundane and quotidian. The garden is thus redefined as a place of work as well as pleasure, of the mundane as well as the spectacular. The analysis we have presented highlights the ways in which a different set of sources can be used to explore the garden as an economic, productive and in some sense domestic system. Account books and bills can seem dry and lifeless documents, but they can also reveal much about cycles of investment and rhythms of planting and harvesting. Drawing on this strength through quantitative analysis, we demonstrate how the everyday can be visualised and understood in aggregation as well as
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 99 individually and as something that unfolds over time as well as existing in the moment. Our analysis has brought together the whole property—the house, pleasure gardens and kitchen gardens—into the sphere of daily, weekly and seasonal routines. This gives greater emphasis to the ways in which the daily lives of gardeners, labourers and owners were shaped by the rhythms and routines of the gardening calendar. This is not to argue for some kind of environmental determinism, not least because seasonal rhythms were overlain by the weekly, monthly and annual cycles of accounting and bookkeeping. However, daily routines and practices within the garden were inevitably shaped by seasonal planting, nurturing and harvesting. This was true for Mary Leigh enjoying the melons grown in the gardens at Stoneleigh Abbey, Thomas Challis carefully setting out cuttings at Audley End, and the nameless labourers engaged to mow the grass and harvest the garden produce at Belsay Hall. The daily activities glimpsed through the payment of bills and recorded more fully in the notebooks of Monck and Challis were simultaneously aggregated onto the pages of summary accounts and into the productive system of the garden. Both on paper and on the ground, therefore, the mundane and everyday can be understood as the experiential reality for the individual and the essential building blocks of the garden as a whole.
Notes 1. Audley End House, Thomas Challis diary. 2. Northumberland Record Office (NRO), ZMI/B53/1, Sir Charles Monck’s notebook, 1815–1836. 3. Tom Turner, English Garden Design, History and Styles since 1650 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’s Club, 1986); Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth Century England (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995). 4. Kate Feluś, The Secret Life of the Georgian Garden: Beautiful Objects and Agreeable Retreats (London: I B Tauris, 2016). 5. David Brown and Tom Williamson, Lancelot Brown and the Capability Men: Landscape Revolution in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 59. 6. Jane Brown, The Pursuit of Paradise, A Social History of Gardens and Gardening (London: Harper Collins, 1999), 245. 7. An exception to this is Andrew Hann, ‘Labour Recruitment on the Audley End Estate in the Late 19th Century’, English Heritage Historical Review 5 (2010): 135–55. 8. Roderick Floud, An Economic History of the English Garden (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 176. 9. Ibid. 10. Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth-Century Household (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery, Consumption and the Country House (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019).
100 Helen Brown and Jon Stobart 11. Warwickshire Record Office (WRO), CR136/V/156, Accounts, 1747–62, CR136/V/136, Accounts, 1763–96. 12. WRO, CR136/V/136, Accounts, 1763–96. 13. The proportion of overall spending dedicated to the garden remained remarkably stable over the decades: always 1.7–2.5 per cent of expenditure on the house and estate as a whole. For fuller discussion, see Stobart and Rothery, Consumption and the Country House, 34–39. 14. On the importance of trust in long-term relationships with suppliers, see Stobart and Rothery, Consumption and the Country House, 196–228. 15. NRO, ZMI/B36/18–22, Cash Books, 1802–1839. 16. NRO, ZMI/S/38, Catalogue of William Falla and Co. Nursery and Seedsman, 1817. 17. Roderick Floud, An Economic History of the English Garden (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 140; Malcolm Thick, ‘Garden Seeds in England before the Late Eighteenth Century—II, the Trade in Seeds to 1760’, Agricultural History Review 38, no. 2 (1990): 105–16. 18. Margaret Maddison, ‘The Callenders, Eighteenth Century Northern Nurserymen and Seedsmen’, Garden History 33, no. 2 (Autumn 2005): 210–24, 210. 19. Ibid., 219. 20. NRO, ZMI/B49/4, Labourer’s Day Book, 1807–1814; NRO, ZMI/B49/7, Labourer’s Day Book, 1827–1839. 21. David SD Jones, Servants of the Lord: Outdoor Staff at the Great Country Houses (Shrewsbury: Quiller, 2017), 100; Hann, ‘Labour Recruitment on the Audley End Estate’, 138. 22. NRO, ZMI/B53/1, Sir Charles Monck’s notebook, 1815–1836. 23. NRO, ZMI/S/35, Sir Charles Monck’s notebook, 1827–1839. 24. Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 106. 25. NRO, ZMI/S/33 and 38. 26. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Collections (SBTC), DR18/5/2048—receipted bill from S. Harris; DR18/5/2272—receipted bill from S. Harris. 27. The peak in cost, but not items in March 1737 reflects the supply of 150 polyanthus roots, for which Harris charged 20 shillings—SBTC, DR18/5/2272. 28. Essex Record Office (ERO), D/DBy A76/7, Bill for fruit trees, garden seeds, etc., July 1818. 29. SBTC, DR18/31/655 Account of Sundries from Stoneleigh Abbey, 1793–98. 30. Jon Stobart, ‘ “So Agreeable and Suitable a Place”: The Character, Use and Provisioning of a Late Eighteenth-century Suburban Villa’, Journal of EighteenthCentury Studies 39, no. 1 (2016): 89–102. 31. See, for example, SBTC, DR18/671—letters to Joseph Hill, 11 February 1791, 11 June 1791. 32. See, for example, SCLA, DR18/671—letters to Joseph Hill, 11 June 1791, 28 January 1792, 25 February 1792. 33. NRO, ZMI/B36/20, Cash Book no. 6, 1809–1815. 34. ERO, D/DBy A44/9–12, Bills for labour to pleasure grounds plantations etc., September—December 1786; Feluś, The Secret Life of the Georgian Garden, 16. 35. ERO, D/DBy A76/1–12. 36. ERO, D/DBy A76/2 and /11. 37. Kenneth Lemmon, The Covered Garden (London: Museum Press, 1962); Melissa Thompson, ‘Georgian and Regency Conservatories: Their Structural and Social Integration with the House’, Occasional Papers from the RHS Lindley Library 17 (October 2019): 34–53.
The Rhythms and Routines of the Garden 101 8. ERO, D/DBy A76/6, /7 and /9. 3 39. ERO, D/DBy A76/3. 40. SBTC, DR18/5/6130—receipted bill from Joseph Naylor. 41. SBTC, DR5/6129—receipted bill from James Fisher. 42. David R. Coffin, The English Garden: Meditation and Memorial (Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58. 43. P. Barfoot and J. Wilkes, Universal British Directory (London, 1793–98), vol. 2, 619. 44. Basil Harley and Jessie Harley, A Gardener at Chatsworth: Three Years in the Life of Robert Aughtie, 1848–1850 (Worcestershire: The Self Publishing Association, 1992), William Cresswell, Diary of a Victorian Gardener: William Cresswell and Audley End (Swindon: English Heritage, 2006). 45. Thomas Challis worked at Audley End from June 16, 1795 (aged seventeen) to February 28th, 1798. 46. Audley End House, Thomas Challis diary. 47. Four Sundays in a leap year. 48. NRO, ZMI/B53/1, Sir Charles Monck’s notebook, 1815–1836. 49. Rebecca Bushnell, Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens (London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 87. 50. Ibid. 51. NRO, ZMI/B15/XIV/4, Letter to the Secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society of London, 15 January 1828; Charles Monck, ‘A Plan for Transplanting Large Forest Trees in Parks. In a Letter to the Secretary. By Sir Charles Miles Lambert Monck, Bart. F H S.’, Transactions of the Horticultural Society of London 7 (1830): 294–98; NRO, ZMI/B53/1.
Part II
Public Space
5 From Microhistory to Patterns of Urban Mobility: The Rhythm of Gendered Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam Bob Pierik According to her testimony given in 1742, one Elisabeth Croen reported that she had first met her ‘fiancé’ on the street on the evening of Tuesday, 31 July, at eight o’clock, during a visit to her brother a few blocks from where she lived. After he had walked her home, he asked if he could come by again. He did so the next afternoon at half-past three and drank coffee together with Elisabeth and her sister. Going out an hour later, they walked through the city together, had a drink in the green space called the Plantage, and went to the Admiralty Wharf to watch the ships. At half-past nine, they went for another drink at the Hoogte Kadijk, just outside the Plantage. Unfortunately, what had seemed to be the beginning of an agreeable courtship went sour when the man turned out to be a charlatan who had begun courting Elisabeth under a false name and was actually living elsewhere in the city.1 While this episode was unfortunate for Elisabeth, it is interesting for historians because of the rich and detailed window it offers into the mobility of non-elite women and men. Meeting new people on the street, walking through the city with companions, venturing far beyond one’s own neighbourhood: these activities appear as ordinary aspects of a culture of everyday mobility and (in this case) courtship. Croen’s account helps us glean insights about when and why people ventured out of their houses, which parts of the city they frequented, and whether and to what extent their lives were constrained within certain areas.2 This chapter intends to contribute to the understanding of early modern daily life through a study of urban mobility in eighteenth-century Amsterdam.3 Recent scholarship has stressed how the members of early modern households routinely transgressed the boundaries of the domestic sphere through their activities in the streets and in the immediate neighbourhood around the home.4 Some scholars go even further, problematising the focus on a strict boundary between house and street by pointing out that this conception is something of an anachronism; however logical it might seem from our current perspective, it would appear strange to early modern eyes.5 A more multi-layered approach to space and its uses is thus called for. Here, in this chapter, instead of focusing on theories of
106 Bob Pierik separate spheres or of public vs private spaces, the chapter regards the gendered everyday life of Amsterdam’s eighteenth-century inhabitants as a matter of practices. Whereas earlier studies have tried to address or bypass the problems of dividing space into public and private areas by introducing the notion of semi-public or ‘liminal spaces’ as a third category, my approach is to move away from such an a priori classification of space and instead to focus on how space was defined in practice.6 In Lefebvrian terms, the starting point for my observations here will be spatial practice rather than representations of space or representational space.7 A more precise understanding of people’s movements in practice can then aid us in formulating alternatives to dichotomies of public and private, in line with much recent scholarship that aims to move beyond such binaries in order to better understand the ‘subtleties of the gendered use of the urban space’.8 Furthermore, such an understanding can help us grasp whether—and, if so, how—gender interacts with space, mobility, and routines. Croen’s case was just one of many episodes or incidents recorded by the office of the specialised notary, where witness statements for the chief officer of Amsterdam were written down. The microhistorical value of these cases, so full of details regarding locations, people, and their activities at specific times, is immediately apparent. But the combination of information drawn from larger numbers of individual cases allows us to discern macro-scale patterns of mobility among urban dwellers, which necessitates a somewhat distinctive approach to routines. Rather than studying the routines of specific persons or groups of people, I have examined the mobility of all persons as given in two years’ worth of witness testimony. All activities, whether routine or incidental, were taken together. Although such an aggregate view of mobility does not directly translate into routines, it reveals important patterns that aid in the study of daily routines over the course of the day. In the terms of the timegeography of Torsten Hägerstrand, they can be seen as fragments of the bundles of paths that individuals throughout the city follow to undertake projects. Such concepts gave time-geographers a language in which they could describe the geography of a world on the move.9 Historians studying urban space have repeatedly stressed how social actors are able to perform, practice, and produce this type of space so that mental topographies and physical experiences converge. This recognition has led to increasing historical specificity, as historians try to flesh out the complex layers of relations that have shaped space. Such new research attends to multiple meanings of spaces, encompassing the alternate experiences of these spaces for different people and the changing meanings they are imbued with over the course of the day.10 In that sense, an aggregate of daily mobility that is sensitive to the time of day can help in understanding the daily transitions that the city goes through and can shed light on the dual process wherein people influence space
From Microhistory to Patterns of Mobility 107 and space influences people. Individual routine is shaped by the city’s physical and social infrastructure, while at the same time the aggregate of all activity itself forms a part of these infrastructures. This chapter, based on witness testimony provided to the chief officer, introduces and explores a general gendered pattern of mobility. It considers in detail the relations of the neighbourhood to daily life and routines as they emerge through examination of the source material.11
Method and Sources For the purpose of this research, a database of practices was created, comprising the observations of people, their actions, and their locations, based upon the aforementioned notarial depositions used for the chief officer’s investigations.12 These reports were drawn up by a specialised notary who almost exclusively produced depositions for the chief officer of Amsterdam. His geographic jurisdiction extended over the entire city and its immediate surroundings. Following a serial and systematic pattern, the notarial depositions are comparable to—but not quite the same as—court records. They are best described as court-like or pre-court records, in the sense that not all the investigations led to arrests and legal proceedings. Thus they capture a broader scope of people and activities than would emerge from the interrogations of suspects in crimes. The usable depositions made in 1742 and 1750 by the notaries Salomon de Fremeri and Cornelis Staal gave us 1,702 persons with an identifiable gender, of which 551 (32 per cent) were women and 1,151 (68 per cent) were men.13 The men and the women in these depositions were found throughout the city, witnessing, taking part in, and being present at crimes, public disputes, and other contentious interactions that caught the eye of the chief officer. For 1,057 of these people, the notaries registered the location of such events and the residences of witnesses, victims, and suspects. This made it possible to investigate how far people ventured out of their neighbourhoods and to get a sense of the scope or radius of their mobility. In themselves small fragments of everyday routine and mobility, these bits of evidence, assessed in hundreds, give insight into the lives of a broad range of people. Robert Shoemaker employed a version of this method on a small scale when he worked with court depositions to shed light on mobility within early modern London. Concluding that not only gender but also social status influenced mobility on the basis of ‘limited samples’ from court records, he then corroborated his observations via other sources.14 Jason Hardgrave’s research on gendered movement in late medieval Venice also uses notarial material. Hardgrave examined a variety of notarial document types out of a selection of priest-notaries and compared the parish where someone lived to the parish where someone had a document drawn up.15 Taking as a point of departure the ways that Shoemaker and
108 Bob Pierik Hardgrave compared whether men and women of varying social status ventured farther afield than their own neighbourhoods and parishes, we can embark on a more extensive sort of assessment by calculating distances more precisely through a digital reconstruction of Amsterdam’s street network. Because of early modern Amsterdam’s circular layout, determining these distances as the crow flies would seriously shorten the actual distance a person travelled in moving from one location to another. The research thus used a georeferenced map by Gerard de Broen from 1724, which approximately matches the street patterns deep into the nineteenth century, to make a street plan that could be used to calculate the distances between event locations and residence locations, so that we can gain more accurate insight into the distances of everyday mobility (see Figure 5.1). Locations were given not with modern addresses but in the form of streets and often indicate their intersections with other streets, alleys, bridges, or other recognisable locations. Hence the distances were calculated by taking the centroids of the area of the possible location as derived from the source material.16 Furthermore, the notarial depositions from Amsterdam provide another opportunity to make a more detailed analysis of routines through the addition of the dimension of time of day. Witnesses noted the time
Figure 5.1 Digital reconstruction of the street network of Amsterdam in 1724, with public clocks and their earliest known year. Source: A.J.M. Brouwer Ancher, ‘Iets over de Amsterdamsche lui- en speelklokken en hare gieters’, Oud Holland 16, no. 2 (1898): 93–111.
From Microhistory to Patterns of Mobility 109 when the events they testified about took place. Through these times, we can obtain accurate information about the temporal nature of the activities that made up people’s daily routines. In Amsterdam, public clocks were spread throughout the city (see Figure 5.1) and were synchronised on a daily basis, with the clock of the Old Church serving as master clock.17 Witnesses generally reported time within the hour, sometimes even within the half-hour, and more rarely within the quarter-hour. For the purpose of this chapter, the accuracy of time-awareness within the hour was assumed for all witnesses—in line with research on Antwerp and London.18 Taken together, these detailed observations, combined with the presence of the street network, allow us to find different people located throughout the city at various times and enable us to grasp something of the broad patterns of everyday mobility and routines in eighteenth-century Amsterdam.
The General Gendered Pattern of Mobility In the course of their daily routines, the distances that the inhabitants of eighteenth-century Amsterdam were found away from their homes varied throughout the day. Figure 5.2 shows the result of calculating the distances between the locations of 1,059 activities of people and their residences, categorised by gender and time of day. The distance is the average for all men or women accounted for and includes the distance ‘0’ for those found at home. This aggregate of all observations shows that men, on average, were found farther away from their homes during each of the three-hour timeslots used for this graph. Initially, this seems to confirm the conventional view that men ranged farther afield in the city than women, who tended to stay closer to or to remain at home; in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, Dini Helmers has supposed, ‘men might have had a larger radius than women’.19 At the same time, the idea, voiced in the conduct literature of the era, that a woman’s place was in the home, was not matched in practice. Instead, we find that women ventured out of their homes at all times of day, and, although the figure shows differences in average distance according to gender, the overall results reveal a fairly similar cyclical pattern for women and men throughout the day. For men and women alike, the afternoon and evening were times of high mobility, the afternoon more so for women and the evening more so for men. In the afternoon, we find a gendered difference in the form of women’s increased mobility, while men’s mobility remains more or less the same, decreasing only slightly as compared to the late morning and midday. The late evening saw a decrease in distance, which was much more pronounced for men. The night was again a time when rather mobile women and men were spotted, followed by the late-night and early morning periods when women were spotted much closer to home. While the exact distances varied, we find, for men and
110 Bob Pierik
Figure 5.2 Average distance in meters between residence and event locations by timeslot and gender from depositions from Salomon de Fremeri’s 1742 and Cornelis Staal’s 1750 depositions (n = 1,057). Source: NL-AsdSAA, inv. nr. 11735 (Salomon de Fremeri 1742) and inv. nr. 13131 (Cornelis Staal 1750).
women alike, a relatively ungendered daily pattern of higher mobility during the midday, afternoon, and night as compared to the evening. In broad strokes, the clearest difference between men and women is the respective distances they are found from their homes, while the distribution throughout the day is roughly similar. Although this finding confirms that men indeed enjoyed a larger radius, women in Amsterdam certainly did not stick to their homes. The high mobility that Figure 5.2 shows during night time does not warrant the conclusion that, for men as well as women, the night was the most or second-most likely time that they would be found far from their homes, because the observations are not equally distributed throughout the day. Figure 5.3 shows a distribution, with a similar development for both women and men, of lower observations at the beginning and the end of the day, although the number of observations of women is higher in the morning and those of men show a steep rise in the evening. So, while the high mobility for the evening shown in Figure 5.2 results from a high number of observations, relatively few observations yielded the
From Microhistory to Patterns of Mobility 111
Figure 5.3 Number of observations by gender and timeslot from depositions from Salomon de Fremeri’s 1742 and Cornelis Staal’s 1750 depositions (n = 1,057).
higher distances seen in the cases of high mobility at night and late at night. Taken together, the two figures show how the evening and afternoon were times full of activity and relatively high mobility, while the night, in contrast, was a time of less activity but also of high mobility for the smaller number of people who went out. Indeed, a major part of the nocturnal observations showing high travel distances consisted of night watches patrolling the streets, which means that this particular manifestation of high mobility represents a specialised subgroup’s mobility rather than high mobility at night in general. The evening and afternoon, then, saw many more activities pursued by a much more diverse group of women and men of varying occupations. A maidservant strolled with her suitor to view the Admiralty wharf; weighing-house porters socialised after work; a group of two men and one woman inspected a pig’s carcass to determine whether this particular specimen had been taxed.20 These examples suggest the sorts of activities taking place throughout the city that carried men and women far from their doorsteps. Some descriptions are quite detailed, though in many other instances only a limited account of a more passive activity can be made, as in ‘present in an alehouse’ or ‘witnessing’. Such cases, though of limited use to the study of actual
112 Bob Pierik activities, can nonetheless enrich the general pattern of overall endeavours, as their distances from home can often be calculated. Comparison of Figure 5.2 and 5.3 also shows that the sharp decrease in men’s mobility during the late evening is not the result of a lack of observations: the number of observations are less than in the evening but still roughly similar to the midday tally. There was no lack of activities and interactions in that timeframe; rather, these reported activities took place closer to home or at home. Interestingly, many more people were reported to be at home from 9 p.m. to after midnight, when the specialised high night and late-night mobility again changes the picture. The average distances women travelled also show a decrease from 9 p.m. onwards, but this decline is relatively less pronounced because the earlier distances had been lower to begin with. The data suggest that 9 p.m. is the start of a period of relative inactivity and immobility for men or at least is the point when immobile men come into view. If such a substantial daily trend of returning home occurred specifically around 9 p.m., what caused it? My argument is that this sweeping shift in mobility within the city was the result of factors regulating mobility from outside the city: One of the most crucial events to structure daily routines was the opening and closing of the eight gates and twenty-one port poles (bomen) through which entry into the city was regulated. One was reminded every day that urban life was life in a gated society through the ringing, every morning, of a gate bell and a pole bell and by a captain, lieutenant, or standard-bearer bringing the gates’ keys from one of the city’s mayors to the gatehouses.21 The gate clock rang again to warn everyone from 9:00 to 9:30 p.m. of the gates’ closure at the latter time, after which the keys of the locked gates were brought back to one of the mayors.22 An ordinance from 1626 stipulates that ‘anyone coming in or out of the gates of this city in the evening has to pay a stuijver for having it opened,’23 which suggests a period of transition between the gates being freely accessible and fully closed, and it seems likely that this period occurred during the ringing of the gate clock. And we find evidence of such a rule being in practice in 1750, because at 9 p.m. on 17 March two gate watchers at the Weteringspoort were threatened, pushed, and struck with rocks when they refused to allow four men to pass through the gate with payment of only half the gate fee of one stuijver per person.24 Official regulations and the city’s material structure in the form of city walls and gates thus left a strong imprint on the pattern of male mobility. Although the gates and poles were relevant for the (timing of) people’s movements in and out of the city, the gate clock also set the pace for a larger part of regulated and institutional life within Amsterdam. Numerous regulations concerning taxable goods, markets, auctions and most city offices (stadambten) were required to be in tune with the gate bell and pole bell in one way or another. In the terms of Hägerstrand’s time-geography, such alignments would be called authority constraints.25
From Microhistory to Patterns of Mobility 113 As the gates opened, people took their positions in weighing-houses and marketplaces as commercial life commenced for the day. Other regulations were explicitly synchronised with the closing of the gates, such as a regulation from 1612, which remained in force until at least 1747, concerning the work of sledmen that ordered the inhabitants of the Halsteeg (a relatively narrow alley that was an important passageway to the central Dam square) to clean the gutters a half-hour after the gate clock had sounded.26 This example shows how commercial activity and the daily transporting of goods were closely linked to the sounding of the gate clock, because only after it sounded did it become possible to clean the gutters. At night, the streetscape utterly changed from 10 p.m. onwards, as rattle guards who called out the hour and the half-hour began patrolling the streets, warning of fire and checking whether people had locked their doors. The ringing of the gate bell at 9 p.m. announced a moment of transition from one version of the city to another. A telling example of this transition is the case of Elisabeth Landwaerd and Marritje Franse, who fled a woman who had assaulted and followed them both between 5:00 and 5:30 p.m. They took refuge in a cellar and asked permission to ‘wait there even up to 10 p.m. to be able to securely walk home with the guards’.27 The institutional framework of time as sketched previously raises the question: to what extent were routines and thus mobility dictated by gender? At first sight, the evening’s lack of substantial relative shifts in women’s mobility shown in Figure 5.2 suggests that women’s mobility might not have been so influenced by the official regulations. Women’s smaller numbers in certain official city jobs and their exclusion from others could plausibly account for such a pattern. At the same time, the system may have been more flexible in practice than in theory. In certain cases, women accompany the men who possess official job titles, doing the same or similar work with an analogous exercise of mobility, though the job title was lacking. To illustrate: although the rattle guards might seemed to exemplify a surveillance system of typically male authority and control over public order, we find the rattle guard and cart man, Pieter Aarnouts, patrolling the streets at night at 1:30 a.m., accompanied by Barendje Hardwijks, his wife. Her work, which can be traced because she appeared as a witness, was carried out without any occupation title (her husband in fact had two occupation titles). This reiterates what research into the gendered nature of work has stressed: the work activities captured via occupation titles tend to show the work of men but leave women in the background.28 Women operating within and on the margins of the institutional framework may thus be less visible in the public record than they would have been in practice, as their work was more often taken for granted in the prevailing logic of household order. Yet it would be wrong to take the instance of Barendje and Pieter and conclude that high mobility at night was ungendered. Their case rather
114 Bob Pierik shows that work could be a constitutive factor for mobility and that gender and household relations were relevant preconditions for work. Women performed assistive labour for highly mobile rattle guards, which could also make these women highly mobile. We therefore have some insight into why the data show gendered differences, even though gender may not be the main constitutive factor to shape mobility. The aggregate is useful as an overview and as a means to recognise patterns, but it is hard to make conclusions about something like ‘typical’ male or female mobility because such assessments do not do justice to the diversity of individual practice. For example, if we remove all observations where incidents took place in the home (and the distance was 0), then the afternoon mobility of women is nearly as high as that of men.29 Moreover, during the afternoon at least, the women who did go out were as mobile as men, venturing far afield in the city and well beyond the streets where they lived.30 No one type of activity stands out; rather, the examples of these more mobile women are diverse. We see women making social visits on their own or visiting taverns. Some were assisting their husbands or other household members, such as the wife of Marte Vasterman, whose husband was a rattle guard. After he had been in a fight in a tavern, he returned to the locale with his wife, his father, and his brother-in-law. Similarly, the wife of Jan Molenaar helped her husband drag a presumed thief through the streets to their house. A final example concerns the wife of Andries Eerhard, who went to the office of the meat tax collectors for an official document for a lamb, insulting all the tax officials she encountered. The women in these last examples were shown only as ‘wife of’ rather than having their full names recorded in the documentation. The early modern legal viewpoint rendered these women relatively invisible because their husbands bore the legal responsibility in these matters. Still, their actions speak loudly and their activities carried them to various places throughout the city.
Mobility and the Neighbourhood In 1740, between 7:00 and 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, 4 February, two men walked into a tavern. The tavern keepers, a husband and wife, later attested that they ‘could see from their posture’ that the pair ‘were very drunk’. The men, Arend Jansze and Pieter van Bemmelen (in the streets known as Lange Piet or ‘Long Pete’), ordered beer and started talking. The notarial deposition in which the tavern keepers gave their testimony continued: Arend Jansze said that within two years, the daughter of Pieter van Bemmelen would be stronger and smarter than the wife of Pieter van Bemmelen, which Pieter van Bemmelen objected to, saying that his wife was as capable of working as the best woman in the neighbourhood, as far as twenty houses.
From Microhistory to Patterns of Mobility 115 Arend Jansze retaliated: ‘Compared to how my wife can make a living, your wife is worthless’.31 Many of the depositions contain such stories of drunk men turning violent, a pattern that, however relevant to all sorts of questions on violence and masculinity, is not what interests us here. His deposition is remarkable for our purposes because of the conversation that preceded the violence that led to the documentation: First, it shows two men who associated a certain pride with the strength and intelligence of the women in their respective households and directly linked that strength and intelligence to their competence in providing the household with income.32 Second, it quantifies the geographical scope of ‘the neighbourhood’ i.e. ‘twenty houses’ and presents it as a relevant scope in the calculus of everyday life and routine. All over urban Europe, the neighbourhood in one form or another formed a crucial point of reference for everyday life for men and women alike.33 Historians have stressed the neighbourhood’s importance in the social and moral networks of women.34 Yet, with regard to Amsterdam, the neighbourhood remains an elusive entity for historians. Unlike many other Dutch cities, Amsterdam never possessed formal neighbourhood corporative institutions, and thus there are no early modern neighbourhood archives. There were quartermasters (wijkmeesters) overseeing the distribution of poor relief in their quarter, but there was not, as in Leiden and Haarlem, the so-called gebuyrte present as an institution, whose leaders partook in common meals and surveyed neighbourhood order. Yet these missing elements do not mean that neighbourhood life did not exist in Amsterdam or that ‘the neighbourhood’ was not a social entity that people referred to and experienced as a site for their daily lives and routines.35 Because of this complexity, defining a neighbourhood is not as straightforward as Pieter van Bremmelen makes it seem, and it also becomes more pressing to delve into what people considered their neighbourhood to be and how this conception affected their daily routines. Historians who have written about the neighbourhood have often focused on the decrease in its everyday importance, especially in and around the long eighteenth century. Catherina Lis and Hugo Soly, presenting an overview of such theories arguing that neighbourhood life deteriorated as the early modern period unfolded, have objected that these narratives often spend too little time defining the neighbourhood and instead have taken for granted its social and spatial dimensions. Mobility plays an interesting role here because, in what Lis and Soly have called a ‘grabbag of economical, demographical, social, political and cultural-mental factors’ causing the neighbourhood to decrease in importance, mobility often emerged as both cause and effect.36 Either increasing mobility deteriorated social ties, or deteriorated social ties heightened the need for increased mobility. To complicate matters, Lis and Soly conclude that social contacts with neighbours were more likely to be stronger when
116 Bob Pierik mobility increased and when alternative sites of solidarity were not in place. Without proffering conclusions on the exact relation between neighbourhood life and mobility, we can at least say that an intricate relation between the two phenomena exists and has existed and that, for different cities and different periods, we should continue asking, ‘What is a neighbourhood?’ However, there is another reason, relevant to mobility, for defining in greater detail what a neighbourhood was. The neighbourhood, district or parish has often functioned as a geographical entity that can help us make sense of mobility. Studies of intra-urban everyday mobility have often used administrative district boundaries or parishes as a unit of measurement of intra-urban mobility, for example by counting the appearance in parish records of people who resided in another parish. If individuals often showed up outside their own neighbourhood, district, or parish, this would indicate a wider scope of mobility and an extension of social and economic networks; it would point to how people routinely transgressed neighbourhood boundaries. Using parishes, districts, or neighbourhoods in this way can be useful given the lack of more specific spatial details, as the studies of Shoemaker and Hardgrave have convincingly shown.37 The notarial materials available for Amsterdam used for this chapter present the opposite problem. The spatial detail is rich, but the lack of official districts and the post-Reformation decline of the parish as a useful spatial boundary results in an absence of spatial proxies to assess the movements of people. Alternatively, one could turn to the sixty civil militia duty districts (burgerwijken) shown in Figure 5.4, but Roodenburg has argued that it is unlikely that people identified with such districts, whose ‘division was somewhat arbitrary-bureaucratic’.38 These districts were made in such a way that the captains of the militia could be recruited from the more affluent and elite-occupied canal belt, while the rank and file would be recruited from the districts lying farther afield. The districts were thus explicitly designed with transgressing social boundaries and networks in mind. Instead of this bureaucratic wijk (district), many people in the depositions routinely mention the often more socially defined entity buurt (neighbourhood). To find out more about the boundaries of the buurt, I surveyed the complete transcriptions of the notarial depositions from 1742 and 1750 used for the database and supplemented these accounts with computergenerated transcriptions of depositions for the chief officer between 1739 and 1748.39 The results revealed some variety in the use of the concept in social practice. In some depositions, neighbours attested to the honesty or dishonesty of current and former neighbours. Sometimes the neighbourhood was named as an entity that could suffer from public disturbances. Often witnesses mentioned that they knew neighbours by name or by face; very often, the neighbourhood functioned as a general location to describe where people lived or had been present, in which case further specification
From Microhistory to Patterns of Mobility 117
Figure 5.4 Amsterdam’s sixty civic militia districts.
of an exact location was deemed unnecessary. For the chief officer’s investigations, knowing that a person lived in the neighbourhood of another person whose residence was known in greater detail was sufficient to find that person. These factors make it very unlikely that the neighbourhoods were very large, and they were probably smaller and more informally defined than the burgerwijken. They probably spanned a few blocks of houses, alleys, and streets. In some cases, especially in those of the very long streets and canals, one street may have covered several neighbourhoods. This buurt was the immediate area surrounding one’s house and was an important site of daily life and routine. Finally, of course, we have Pieter van Bremmelen’s definition of twenty houses, cited at the start of this section. His definition is supported from research on another city. A plan from 1577 for the city of Leiden strengthens the idea of neighbourhood life stretching approximately to an area covering twenty houses, since the municipality proposed reorganising the neighbourhood associations (gebuyrten) so that they would stretch from sixteen to twenty-four houses.40 If we adopt this number of twenty houses, take ten randomised points throughout the city, and draw ten lines as far as the nearest twenty houses on the basis of Gerrit de Broen’s 1724 map, then ten houses in Amsterdam cover an average distance of 223.67 meters.41 So instead of using administrative boundaries, I propose that a distance of roughly 225 meters can be an imperfect
118 Bob Pierik but workable proxy for what was considered the neighbourhood immediately surrounding the home. Of course, some neighbourhoods may have overlapped with others, may have been bigger or smaller, or there may not even have been consensus among neighbours what exactly their neighbourhood was, but the estimate of 225 meters functions as a proxy distance to compensate for the lack of usable alternative spatial definitions of neighbourhoods/buurten. When we add this proxy distance for the neighbourhood to the graph presented earlier, as is done in Figure 5.5., it becomes clear that the fluctuations in women’s mobility cross this abstract neighbourhood boundary throughout the day. Although the afternoon peak of women’s mobility is the time when they were often found far from their neighbourhoods, women remained closer to the neighbourhood boundary than men did throughout the day. This tendency seems to suggest that this area around the home was an important domain for women’s everyday mobility— not as a structure in which they were strictly confined but rather as the environment within which much everyday interaction took place. Women’s activities occurred outside their homes but more often in areas that remained within the bounds of what we have taken as a proxy for the
Figure 5.5 Average distance of between residence and event locations by time of day and gender from the depositions of Salomon de Fremeri (1742) and Cornelis Staal (1750). (n = 1,057).
From Microhistory to Patterns of Mobility 119 neighbourhood. In the terms of time-geography, it was not the case that women were limited by gendered capability constraints or authority constraints in the sense that they were physically or legally obstructed in their movements. What is more likely is that coupling constraints such as those of social life and interaction with neighbours led to the results shown previously.42 Men, in contrast, were more often found much farther away from the neighbourhoods where they lived. This shows that many people used the city in a larger scope than was provided by their own neighbourhoods in an urban locale where the vast majority of people moved on foot. Finally, women’s mobility being more closely centred around the (proxy) neighbourhood line has something to do with the nature of the source material itself. In an English context, Voth has argued that the low number of women as witnesses in his dataset based on the Old Bailey resulted from it being likely that ‘men were . . . seen as better witnesses’.43 Although with women comprising 32 per cent, the notarial records used for my dataset yield a better relative representation of women than does Voth’s dataset; there would have to be at least a majority of women if it were truly the case that witness selection was completely neutral and in line with demographic trends.44 The question, then, is to what extent the relative immobility of women is not partially the result of normative ideals, in the sense that women’s testimonies were deemed stronger when they concerned matters that happened in their own neighbourhoods. If those women were deemed more fit as witnesses than others, the big question is whether proximity to one’s residential location was itself a factor in the politics of witness selection and whether those standards were gendered. In other words, if a woman’s statement as a witness was deemed more valuable if it concerned matters that had happened in her own neighbourhood, it is logical that the results would show more women within their own neighbourhoods. The surveillance systems expected preference for the voices of women who had been at home and in their neighbourhood on the occasion of a specific conflict can also be read as a reflection of a social practice that gave women an important role in the neighbourhood.45 The surveillance system’s reliance on the gazes and voices of women could hence have been a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it reiterated norms concerning the respectability of spatial confinement even as, on the other hand, it meant that the authorities took seriously the social role and power of women within their neighbourhoods. Neighbours certainly recognised that routine activities taking women outside on the street in their own neighbourhoods provided a legitimate way for them to lay claim to urban space. A telling example occurred on August 25, 1750, at 7 a.m. in the morning, when the maidservant of Abraham Cohen Rodrigues put some clothes intended for bleaching on the hay barge of her neighbour Jan Scholten. Immediately, Scholten’s son
120 Bob Pierik came out onto the street, threatening to toss the clothes into the water. He threw the maidservant on the barge floor when she tried to stop him. After she had fled back into her house, some neighbours assembled. One of them asked the neighbour: ‘Why can’t the maid put those goods in the barge?’ to which the neighbour replied: ‘What concern is that to you, you thief of barges’. A violent standoff was barely prevented, but seven neighbours later gave testimony that this had been the last straw: Jan Scholten had ‘maltreated all of them from time to time so that the whole neighbourhood was constantly disturbed’.46 The scarce shared spaces directly outside one’s home could not uniformly be claimed by one person or household. Apparently, it was reasonable to most neighbours that Jan Scholten’s hay barge should serve as a shared space available to other neighbours under certain circumstances, likely during the times when he was not using it himself and when the maid had legitimately used it in going about her domestic routine.
Conclusions Everyday mobility and routines can be tricky to pin down, because both are so often part of the given; these are phenomena ‘so ingrained into the fabric of the everyday that it is not even noticed’.47 Especially in a historical context, routines and mobility appear indirectly in the available sources. This chapter has followed and expanded upon a method of distilling the paths of past people from legal sources. Examining a large number of fragmented testimonies from notarial attestations made visible a pattern of daily mobility in which the distances involved in everyday mobility in eighteenth-century Amsterdam possessed a gendered aspect, though the overall rhythm of mobility during the day itself was relatively ungendered. Men used a wider scope of the city than did women, who remained closer to their residences but were by no means confined to the home. The results further show that the material structure of the city, in the form of city walls and gates, left an imprint on daily mobility that could be studied empirically through the quantitative analysis of fragmentary information on daily lives. Yet this imprint was not a matter of the pure materiality of walls and gates but rather a case of what timegeographers describe as ‘authority constraints’. These regulated mobility at the level of access to the entire city, but they also carried over into the rhythm and routines of life within Amsterdam, as official and formal life was regulated along the schedule of the city’s gate clocks. There remains an uncertainty to the data faced not just by the method followed here but by most (if not all) research on historical gendered difference. The question concerns what kind of gendered difference is revealed by the results: is it a difference in the entity that we want to observe or one that the creator of the source applied? At the same time, the two forms of difference are not mutually exclusive and might even reinforce
From Microhistory to Patterns of Mobility 121 each other. In this case, gendered witness selection may have decreased the number of observations involving mobile women; if so, this suggests that women’s mobility was deemed questionable, an attitude that is very likely to have affected women’s actual mobility. Whatever the case, the comparison of aggregated women and men produces a gendered difference that should not be taken as typical for all women or men, but it does help compose a general view of mobility that forms a promising starting point for further research on the circumstances under which exceptions to it arose. The appearance of women in informal and supporting roles within an institutional framework formally excluding them is one such instance worth subsequent exploration and further confirms that practicebased approaches possess considerable potential to help us uncover more information on early modern women’s activities and mobilities.
Notes 1. Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Archief van de Notarissen ter Standplaats Amsterdam (Hereafter: ‘NL-AsdSAA’), inv. nr. 11735, Salomon de Fremeri Minuutacten, scan 294. 2. For more on such narratives of seduction, see Katie Barclay, ‘Mapping the Spaces of Seduction: Morality, Gender and the City in Early NineteenthCentury Britain’, in The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience, ed. Deborah Simonton (London: Routledge, 2017). 3. This work was conducted in the context of the research project ‘The Freedom of the Streets. Gender and Urban Space in Eurasia (1600–1850)’ supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under grant number 267–68–007. 4. Riitta Laitinen, ‘Home, Urban Space and Gendered Practices in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Turku’, in The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience, ed. Deborah Simonton (London: Routledge, 2017), 147; Maria Ågren, ed., Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 212–13. 5. Joachim Eibach, ‘Das Offene Haus. Kommunikative Praxis im Sozialen Nahraum der Europäischen Frühen Neuzeit’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 38, no. 4 (October 1, 2011): 624. 6. For a study using ‘liminal space’ see: Dirk Lueb, ‘Komt voor de deur op straat! De ruimtelijke dynamiek van achttiende-eeuws kroeggeweld in Amsterdam’, Tijdschrift Voor Geschiedenis 130, no. 2 (May 2017): 153–71. For a critical discussion on such spatial categorisation, see Danielle van den Heuvel, ‘Gender in the Streets of the Premodern City’, Journal of Urban History 45, no. 4 (2019): 693–710. 7. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford Blackwell, 1991), vol. 142, 38–39; Leif Jerram, ‘Space: A Useless Category for Historical Analysis?’ History and Theory 52, no. 3 (2013): 411. 8. Sanne Muurling and Marion Pluskota, ‘The Gendered Geography of Violence in Bologna, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries’, in The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience, ed. Deborah Simonton (London: Routledge, 2017), 154. See also Amanda J. Flather, ‘Space, Place, and Gender: The Sexual and Spatial Division of Labor in the Early Modern Household’, History and Theory 52, no. 3 (October 1, 2013): 344–60.
122 Bob Pierik 9. Torsten Hägerstrand, ‘Diorama, Path and Project’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 73, no. 6 (December 1, 1982): 323–39. 10. Muurling and Pluskota, ‘The Gendered Geography of Violence’, 160–61. 11. Sanne Muurling and Marion Pluskota, ‘The Gendered Geography of Violence in Bologna, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries’, in The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience, ed. Deborah Simonton (London: Routledge, 2017), 153–63. 12. See Danielle van den Heuvel et al., ‘The Freedom of the Streets. Nieuw onderzoek naar gender en stedelijke ruimte in Eurazië (1600–1850)’, Stadsgeschiedenis 13, no. 2 (2018): 133–45. Technical support for the database was provided by support officers Ivan Kisjes and Leon van Wissen from the CREATE-lab of the Amsterdam Centre for Cultural Heritage and Identity. 13. NL-AsdSAA, inv. nr. 11735, Salomon de Fremeri Minuutacten, NL-AsdSAA, inv. nr. 13131, Mr. Cornelis Staal Minuutacten. A deposition was deemed usable when at least once were the three factors ‘person,’ ‘action,’ and ‘location’ present in the record and the action took place in Amsterdam or its surroundings. 14. Robert Shoemaker, ‘Gendered Spaces: Patterns of Mobility and Perceptions of London’s Geography, 1660–1750’, in Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720, ed. J.F. Merritt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 148–49. 15. Jason D. Hardgrave, ‘Parishes and Patriarchy: Gender and Boundaries in Late Medieval Venice’, Viator 41, no. 1 (January 2010): 251–75. 16. That means that the precision of the following data should not be taken as exactly accurate on the level of meters but with a potential margin of error of roughly 100 meters. In some cases that margin is actually much smaller; in other cases with a fuzzy location, the margin is larger. 17. Melchior Fokkens, Beschrijvinge der wijdt-vermaarde Koop-stadt Amstelredam (Amsterdam: Marcus Willemsz Doornick, 1662), 195. 18. For Antwerp, see: Bruno Blondé and Gerrit Verhoeven, ‘Against the Clock: Time Awareness in Early Modern Antwerp, 1585–1789’, Continuity and Change 28, no. 2 (August 2013): 213–44. For eighteenth-century London, Voth concludes that ‘even those without watches could easily tell the time to within an hour.’ Hans-Joachim Voth, Time and Work in England: 1750– 1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 58. 19. Dini Helmers, Gescheurde bedden: oplossingen voor gestrande huwelijken, Amsterdam 1753–1810 (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren, 2002), 328. Helmers uses the Dutch term actieradius (radius of action). Social scientists working on current-day mobility use the term ‘radius of gyration,’ which also has different meanings but is used as the ‘characteristic distance travelled by an individual during the period of observation.’ For the purposes of this paper, I take ‘radius’ to mean ‘characteristic travelled distance,’ which is also clearly what Helmers means by actieradius. Luca Pappalardo and Filippo Simini, ‘Data-Driven Generation of Spatio-Temporal Routines in Human Mobility,’ Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 32, no. 3 (December 27, 2017): 811. 20. NL-AsdSAA, inv. nr. 13131, Mr. Cornelis Staal Minuutacten, scan 358. 21. Hermanus Noordkerk, Handvesten; ofte privilegien ende octroyen mitsgaders willekeuren, costuimen, ordonnantien en handelingen der stad Amstelredam (Amsterdam: Hendrik van Waesberge, Salomon Schouten and Petrus Schouten, 1748), 837. The gates opened at a fixed time that varied seasonally. See Noordkerk, Handvesten, 826. 22. Noordkerk, Handvesten (1748), 837; Hermanus Noordkerk, Vervolg van de Handvesten; ofte privilegien ende octroyen mitsgaders willekeuren,
From Microhistory to Patterns of Mobility 123 costuimen, ordonnantien en handelingen der stad Amstelredam (Amsterdam: wed. S. Schouten en Zoon, 1755), 33. 23. Noordkerk, Handvesten (1748), 706. 24. NL-AsdSAA, inv. nr. 13131, Mr. Cornelis Staal Minuutacten, scan 311. 25. Rob Sullivan, The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 31–32. 26. Noordkerk, Handvesten (1748), 1086. 27. NL-AsdSAA, inv. nr. 11735, Salomon de Fremeri Minuutacten, scan 375. Original text: ‘daer liever wilde wagten al was het tot thien uuren om als dan tot haar securiteit met de wagt na huijs te kunnen gaen’. 28. Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Off the Record: Reconstructing Women’s Labor Force Participation in the European Past,’ Feminist Economics 18, no. 4 (October 1, 2012): 39–67; Ariadne Schmidt, ‘The Profits of Unpaid Work. “Assisting Labour” of Women in the Early Modern Urban Dutch Economy’, The History of the Family 19, no. 3 (July 3, 2014): 303–6; Jane Whittle, ‘Enterprising Widows and Active Wives: Women’s Unpaid Work in the Household Economy of Early Modern England’, History of the Family 19, no. 3 (September 2014): 283; Jonas Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz and Göran Rydén, ‘The Diversity of Work’, in Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society, ed. Maria Ågren (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 26. 29. Men: 919 meters, women: 908 meters. 30. In all other timeslots, men were still more mobile. 31. NL-AsdSAA, inv. nr. 11733, Salomon de Fremeri Minuutacten, scan 75. Original text: ‘Den persoon van Arend Jansze heeft gezegt dat binnen twee jaeren de zelve dogter van Pieter van Bemmelen voornoemt desselfs huijsvrouw in kragten en verstand zoude te booven gaan, dat van den persoon van Pieter van Bemmelen wierdt tegengesprooken voegende daer bij dat zijn huijsvrouw zoo bequam was om te werken als de beste vrouw in de buurt als was het twintig huijzen ver; dat den persoon van Arend Jansze daer op heeft gezegd, wat zou uw vrouw weesen? Uw vrouw is maer een lor tegens mijn vrouw om de kost te winnen’. 32. The Dutch phrase used is kost the winnen, here translated as ‘making a living.’ A kostwinner is a breadwinner or provider, but since it carries the association with the later male breadwinner model, I have translated it this way in the hopes of avoiding anachronism. 33. Cf. B. S. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women Family and Neighbourhood in Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); David Garrioch and Mark Peel, ‘Introduction: The Social History of Urban Neighborhoods,’ Journal of Urban History 32, no. 5 (July 1, 2006): 663–76. 34. Laura Gowing, ‘The Freedom of the Streets: Women and Social Space 1560– 1640,’ in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 137; Eleanor Hubbard, City Women: Money, Sex, and the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 148–52. 35. Herman Roodenburg, ‘Naar een etnografie van de vroegmoderne stad: De “Gebuyrten” in Leiden en Den Haag,’ in Cultuur en maatschappij in Nederland 1500–1850: een historisch-antropologisch perspectief, ed. Peter te Boekhorst, Peter Burke, and Willem Frijhoff (Meppel: Boom / Open universiteit, 1992), 221. 36. Hugo Soly and Catherina Lis, ‘Beter een goede buur dan een verre vriend: buurschap en buurtleven in Westeuropese steden aan het eind van het Ancien Régime,’ in De Kracht der Zwakken. Studies over arbeid en arbeidersbeweging
124 Bob Pierik in het verleden, ed. Boudien de Vries and Erik Nijhof (Amsterdam: Stichting Beheer Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, 1992), 87–89. 37. Hardgrave, ‘Parishes and Patriarchy’; Shoemaker, ‘Gendered Spaces.’ 38. Roodenburg, ‘Naar een etnografie van de vroegmoderne stad,’ 223. 39. These transcriptions were made with the use of the Transkribus software, developed by the Digitisation and Digital Preservation group of the University of Innsbruck. The transcriptions of the material from 1742 were used to train a model to recognise the handwriting of Salomon de Fremeri and his clerks. The results were 169 hits of the word buurt and similar varieties of spelling. 40. Roodenburg, ‘Naar een etnografie van de vroegmoderne stad,’ 224. 41. The distances in meters are 129, 135, 163, 213, 228, 229, 244, 264, 264, and 273, making the median 228.5. 42. Rob Sullivan, The Geography of the Everyday: Toward an Understanding of the Given (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 26–32. 43. Voth, Time and Work in England, 34. 44. Lotte van de Pol, Het Amsterdams Hoerdom: Prostitutie in de Zeventiende en Achttiende Eeuw (Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1996), 106–11. 45. Cf. Margaret Hunt, ‘Wife Beating, Domesticity and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London,’ Gender & History 4, no. 1 (March 1, 1992): 10–33; Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women Family and Neighbourhood in Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 46. NL-AsdSAA, inv. nr. 13131, Mr. Cornelis Staal Minuutacten, scan 739. Original text: ‘alle molest van tijd tot tijd aen elk van hen heeft aengedaen zodat de geheele buurt geduurlijk door hem ontrust werdt’. 47. Sullivan, The Geography of the Everyday, 29.
6 Space, Sociability and Daily Life in Early Nineteenth-Century Finnish Polite Society Topi Artukka
Carl Axel Gottlund was a student at the university in Turku. He had participated in a number of assemblies in his hometown, Porvoo, but his experience in Turku was completely different. Entering the Turku Assembly House for the first time in March 1814, he noted in his diary that: There was an assemblé in the Societetshuset [Turku Assembly House] in the evening. I went there to see the beauty of this town. Krogius, with whom I went, was the only student besides Lethin, whom I already knew. In the first room we were welcomed by 4 or 5 men, who took our coats, galoshes and hats, and gave us numbers, which we needed to hold on to. Then we went through a few rooms, until we arrived at the ticket office. I bought mine and went into the ballroom, which was considerably large. Soon music, performed from a high gallery, began with an awful noise. There were 15 musicians. They opened with a polonaise, and if you wanted to take a lady to dance, you needed to walk with her for a while and then stop. For this reason, at one moment nobody danced and, at the next, the floor was full of dancing couples.1 A building with several rooms, the Turku Assembly House had the biggest ballroom in the country, a major orchestra and music gallery, and a fashionable new dance ready to sweep one away. Besides an illustration of a personal adventure, Gottlund’s note is an interesting documentation of the interior of the Assembly House itself. It is one of very few personal observations of the premises from inside the building in the 1810s. In his diary note, he describes the routine practices of an assembly and the impact created by the organisation and architecture of a specific space. The Turku Assembly House was set up for polite society and their social life in Turku (Åbo in Swedish).2 For Gottlund, this experience was a first, but in the wider context this type of event had been popular for decades. A new kind of urban sociability had flourished in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, filling European ballrooms, operas, theatres, pleasure gardens, concert
126 Topi Artukka halls and other public and semi-public venues.3 This urban renaissance, as Peter Borsay has named it, was a common phenomenon everywhere in Europe, where it spread from country to country through social elites who shared the same lifestyle, customs and values.4 Urban sociability shone at its most grandiose form in London, St. Petersburg, Paris, Vienna, Stockholm and in other major cities. However, the same culture also existed vividly in provincial capitals and smaller towns like Turku.5 Sociability was an intensive part of daily life for polite society, which in Turku comprised the nobility, the wealthy bourgeoisie and academy professors and civil servants from the courts, corporation and state, together with Russian officers stationed in the town. University students like Carl Gottlund lay at the fringes, occasionally participating in the assemblies, opera and theatre plays, concerts, dinners, tea parties, casual visits, promenades and rendezvous in coffee houses, restaurants and inns that kept elites busy on a daily basis. These events and encounters were places to meet new acquaintances and to strengthen existing ones; to exchange information, news and gossips; to talk about politics, business and marriage. Sociability and the social networks of fashionable society needed constant maintenance and advancement and can thus be compared to active work. In Turku, the Assembly House was an integral part of this work, since it provided space for several activities and meetings. For this reason, it offers an interesting perspective on elite lives.6 Therefore, this chapter focuses in more detail on this building and how it shaped and maintained various routines and practices of polite society. The waves of urban sociability reached the shores of Turku, the biggest and the most significant town in the region of Finland in the Swedish realm, during the second half of the eighteenth century. Amongst Turku’s elite an active social life was established around genteel people who worked in the university, in the court of appeal and other civil offices. Besides the literati and officers, the town merchants and the nobility who lived close by also engaged in Turku’s social life. University professors—and literati in general—were particularly active, and several new forms of sociability were established through their initiatives. The music society, the economic society and the society of the learned, which founded the first newspaper in Finland, were all established towards the end of the eighteenth century. These circles hosted balls, concerts and other social activities, which formed the foundation for urban sociability in the town.7 The foundation of the Turku Assembly House in 1812 was part of a new urban elite culture that had started in the late eighteenth century, but it was given impetus by the geopolitical shift, which happened in 1808– 1809, when Russian annexed the Finnish provinces from Sweden. Turku was then the capital and largest town in the newly established Grand Duchy of Finland, with over 11,000 inhabitants. The Assembly House was founded after large numbers of Finnish elite and the aristocratic
Space, Sociability and Daily Life 127 representatives of the new Russian authorities moved to Turku. Together they formed a unique example of the new urban and cosmopolitan sociability, which accelerated the development of social life in the town.8 This chapter discusses the daily routines and the daily practices of polite society in early nineteenth-century Turku, focusing in particular on the Assembly House. Of course, this was a place of work for several men and women, but our concern is with those who used the space for polite sociability. The central research questions are, first, how does a certain space, built for the purpose of social gatherings and dancing, act as a scene of everyday life and, second, what kind of daily routines were created and enacted by members of polite society in this space? The chapter shows how the Assembly House gave rhythm to elite social life through weekly gatherings and balls and how it offered different kinds of everyday services to the people of Turku and to visitors from outside the town. The chapter is built on two notions about the relationship between space and sociability. First, it recognises that buildings structure social space by providing its material settings, and thus sociability is dependent on the walls, the floors, the roof and the windows. The relationship between sociability and buildings is mutual: sociability creates a need for a certain space. As the sociologist Thomas F. Gieryn notes: ‘Buildings stabilize social life. They give structure to social institutions, durability to social networks, persistence to behaviour patterns’.9 Second, it acknowledges that one building comprises several separate spaces rather than one uniform entity.10 These rooms, such as the ballroom, the restaurant and the billiards room, created socially distinct arenas with different purposes and different sets of rules and regulations, which again played a role in different people’s everyday life and routines. All these separate spaces together made the Turku Assembly House the most prominent and popular place in the town among polite society. The source material for understanding the history of the Turku Assembly House is meagre and challenging, not least because the Great Fire of Turku in 1827 destroyed almost the entire town and many of the public archives and private documents with it. What survived, besides the Assembly House itself, are account books from 1817 and 1818 and Assembly House minutes for the period 1812–1825, which have omissions. These provide a good understanding of the basic functional structures of the Assembly House but do not tell us much about daily life and the experiences of individuals. To address this shortcoming, the chapter draws on some of the surviving private source material, especially a diary of the court of appeals official and later senator, Johan Winter. This describes in detail the life of polite society in Turku from 1812 onwards but only from the perspective of Winter’s own social circles, and of course it makes little mention of daily routines and practices that were, perhaps, too mundane to be noted.
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The Assembly House The main reason for building the assembly rooms in Turku was the desire to offer proper and up-to-date facilities for sociability. The Assembly House Company was founded in 1810 to raise funds, oversee construction and then run the business. Construction started in the same year and was completed in 1812. Fundraising was mainly aimed at the Swedishspeaking elite in Turku and the neighbouring areas, but one of the earliest fundraising documents was written in French, which indicates that the newly arrived Russian elite in the town were targeted as well. The document was a direct translation from the Swedish-language version, so the information given to the investors was the same regardless of the language, and, it seems, similar motivations were being appealed to among both residents and Russian visitors.11 More generally, this underlines the idea that sociability was used as a part of building social relations between the ruling Russian authorities and their new subjects. The Assembly House drew widespread support from local elites, and the company quickly attracted over 200 shareholders. These investorowners represented all strands of polite society, which made the construction of the building everyone’s project: barons, jurists, military officers, wealthy merchants, manufacturers, clerks, academy professors, state officials, captains, magistrates and so on. Nearly one-fifth of the contributors were merchants, whose investments also tended to be the largest. As men usually represented the family, there were only a few unmarried or widowed women investing under their own name. However, this clearly shows that some women had the economic means to partake in polite society as investors as well as participants. They controlled their own assets and decided where to invest. The initiative for better leisure facilities came from the residents of Turku but also from the Russian authorities, who had rapidly increased their presence in Turku after 1809. Several of them not only funded the assembly house project but also participated in social events in the town.12 The Turku Assembly House acted as a model and inspiration for the other projects both in planning the programme and in financing the construction and operation of the buildings in the Grand Duchy. Similar assembly houses, operated by private companies, were founded in the towns of Vaasa (1820), Pori (1825) and Helsinki (1828). The investorownership model was applied not only to assembly houses but also to other cultural and leisure facilities, such as spas and theatres.13 It followed a similar model to that deployed in England where subscribers paid for the construction of many of the assembly rooms, although there were also subscribers who only bought the right to attend the assemblies, rather than actually owning the company.14 The Turku Assembly House was first planned to be a wooden building, but the owners eventually decided to have a large stone building instead,
Space, Sociability and Daily Life 129 as they wanted to enhance their facilities. The outcome was a building 46 metres long and almost 10 metres high, with over 1,600 square metres on two floors. Next to the Assembly House, the company built several smaller wooden buildings: a small brewery and a bakery, an ice cellar and accommodation facilities in the form of a hotel. The Assembly House and its main building instantly became a noted landmark in Turku.15 It was situated near the town centre, next to the river Aura and comprised the fourth-biggest building in town after the castle, the cathedral and the main building of the university. Built by and for the town’s elite, it can thus be seen as representing their power and status, as well as fulfilling a desire for leisure and amusement. The ground level of the main building had a restaurant, some small meeting rooms and a billiards room (Figure 6.1). The restaurant and meeting rooms were leased out to a private entrepreneur, as were the accommodation facilities and most of the outdoor buildings. On the first floor, there was the main assembly hall or ballroom, a dining area, another billiards room and facilities for both men and women. The 225 square-metre ballroom was built to be the finest dancehall in the Grand Duchy; it was also the first building of such grandeur in the Grand Duchy to be built purely for enjoyment and pleasure.16 Because of the novelty and grandiose scene, it instantly became the premier place for polite society to gather and for visitors to stay when coming to Turku. The Turku Assembly House resembled the English assembly rooms from the perspective of space and room planning. According to this genre, assembly rooms were built around a grand ballroom, which was usually rectangular, with space enough for both dancers and spectators. Assembly rooms were usually lavishly decorated with chandeliers, curtains and ornaments, which emphasised the extravagance of the great hall. Music galleries for the orchestras were equally common in the ballrooms, but towards the end of the eighteenth century the galleries began to be replaced with raised platforms. Rooms next to the ballroom were divided in a manner similar to those in York, Bath, Norwich and elsewhere: they offered opportunities to refresh oneself with beverages or to socialise in the card room with other members of polite society who chose not to dance.17 In search for inspiration, Turku also looked at Sweden where assembly rooms of this type were becoming more common in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The renowned Stockholm’s Stock Exchange (Börshus) was built in the 1770s, and it quickly became an arena for a new type of social and political relations. Linköping had its own assembly house built in 1806 and Malmö in 1809, reflecting growing demand for modern public leisure facilities. Furthermore, old premises found a new life as well, several royal facilities being converted into places for urban leisure and amusements.18 In common with practice elsewhere in Europe, the assembly house in Turku was run by a board appointed by the owners: an eight-member
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Figure 6.1 Turku Assembly House floor plans from company’s Fire Policy Insurance 1816. Source: National Archives of Finland. Photo Topi Artukka.
Space, Sociability and Daily Life 131 board making decisions about the everyday operation of the rooms.19 Company shareholders elected the board members—usually local nobilities, burghers and literati—who were also entitled to use their voices in annual general meetings. These shareholders were again drawn from the town’s elite. As a result, elite expectations, ideas and norms were the dominant force, both through the board’s decision making (as they were influenced by their background) and via the influence of the company’s shareholders. Consequently, the elite’s lifestyle and taste shaped the rules and norms in the Turku Assembly House.
Assemblies Like much of the European elite, polite society in Turku loved dancing, and the main opportunities for this were assemblies. From the 1770s, Turku’s university professors, court and province officials and the bourgeoisie were already used to assemblies in private homes and in temporary ballrooms located at inns, but it was the Assembly House that stabilised this culture in the town. Before its construction, the location of assemblies varied and thus shifted the consistent rhythm of the evenings. The new Assembly House changed this and gave the town’s elite a permanent place to gather and socialise and a better, more functional and exquisite space in which to do so. Assemblies gave structure and routine to the elite’s social calendar.20 They were held from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Sundays, usually every fortnight. The spring season started in January and lasted until April or May, and, after the summer break, the dances continued in early October and lasted until the end of the year. In total, members of Turku’s polite society had eighteen opportunities to socialise under the chandeliers of the Assembly House each year. On top of that, the board of the company also organised masquerades four times a year. All events were decided beforehand by the board, so the attendees were familiar with the complete schedule for the season when the first notes of the season began to play.21 This kind of seasonal regularity was a common feature of assemblies also outside of Finland, but these were the first social events that gave a certain, probably much needed, framework for sociability in Turku.22 Continuity was important and, thanks to the predictability of the programme, the town’s elite could organise their social schedule around the assemblies, if they wanted. On the other hand, they could skip certain events, if they knew that the next opportunity would arise within the next few weeks. Routines did not always settle like the board might have wanted. For example, while the assemblies started at 6 p.m., the elites did not necessarily arrive promptly, and many turned up whenever they wanted— often hours late. On several occasions Johan Winter arrived at the assemblies around 8 p.m., and on 1 December 1816, he came at 10 p.m.,
132 Topi Artukka only an hour before time was called at 11 p.m.23 Sometimes the place was half empty, and sometimes it was packed with participants or, as Winter describes it: ‘8 o’clock to the club [assemblies], where a lot of people were gathered in a real crowd’.24 Closing time, on the other hand, was followed as the board instructed, at least for the regular assemblies. However, privately organised balls could last until 4 a.m. or even 6 a.m., if polite society had the energy to dance until the break of the day. Late dancing hours were also allowed for the masquerades run by the company board, suggesting that temporal routines were shaped by the nature of the occasion rather than the identity of the host.25 The assemblies in Turku followed the same model seen in Britain, Sweden and elsewhere. Dancing was the main amusement and uniting element at Almack’s Assembly Rooms in London, in the Linköping Assembly and Theatre House in Sweden and in the Turku Assembly House, although local differences are apparent. Almack’s assemblies were run by female patronesses, while Linköping and Turku’s were led by a male board. At Linköping an attempt was made to implement stricter rules on behaviour and clothing—something that did not happen in Turku, at least not via formal regulations. Just as important as dancing was the opportunity to converse and socialise with acquaintances from one’s social circle and from polite society more generally. Light refreshments were served along the activities.26 In Turku the house served tea, lemonade, almond milk and pipe tobacco, and participants could also purchase wine, toddy and food.27 Both the dancing and the conversations that took place amongst spectators facilitated gossip, the exchange of news and information, discussion of politics and new business activities and offered participants a chance to get to know new people. They also gave those looking for wives or husbands the opportunity to explore possible marital options, which was an important reason for sociability especially for the youth. In the regulations of the assemblies in Turku, jeu de commerce is listed as one of the evening entertainments—most likely referring to the popular card game of that name.28 Again, these were related to questions of sociability and giving people other ways to amuse themselves during the assemblies. The success of the assemblies relied heavily on the idea of familiarity and routine. The basic programme was the same, with hardly any alteration from one assembly to another. The event always started and closed at the same time; participants all came from the same social group, largely knew one another and were familiar with the required social norms. The assemblies in Turku also attracted visitors from different regions, but the regulations of the House and the board of directors made sure that all attendees were from the elite or gentry.29 The same familiarity was true of the dances, but new forms spread quickly across the continent—a reflection of the importance and popularity of dancing amongst the European elite.30 A dance that was fashionable in Stockholm in the winter would
Space, Sociability and Daily Life 133 reach Turku by May or even quicker depending on the season. The local elite mastered several group and country dances, such as the polonaise, different versions of the quadrille and other country dances. The minuet was already out of fashion in the early nineteenth-century Turku, but waltzes, on the other hand, were just about to captivate the hearts of polite society. They spread to Turku in the early years of the century and consolidated its position during the 1810s and 1820s.31 Regardless of the success that waltzing gained among polite society, the old country dances maintained their position in assemblies and balls: innovation merged with tradition to create a new and yet familiar programme. Everyone in the town—or at least those who had purchased a season ticket and had attended several assemblies—knew what kinds of events to expect. They were familiar with their routine and practice, because these did not change much from one event to another or over the years. The selection of dances and social games might alter a little but not to a level that transformed the routines in any fundamental way. On the one hand, these routines and social norms thus gave support and customs to lean on, ensuring conformity in the practices of elite sociability. New spatial facilities, regular schedules and routines invited more people to attend the assemblies. Larger crowds made polite society regulate social behaviour through norms and routines. These were implemented through etiquette, manners and various rules.32 The Turku Assembly House was part of this development, since they regulated the admission and social behaviour of polite society in assemblies.33 However, the programme was so engrained that attendees may even have become bored with it; some might even have skipped the beloved assemblies. This can be read between the lines of Johan Winter’s diary remarks. Winter, who was a noticeable figure in Turku’s polite society, wrote in 1819: ‘Went to the club [assemblies] at half past 8, the crowd wasn’t that numerous— less noble’.34 Sometimes he cited that the dance club in Turku Assembly House was ‘good enough’.35 Winter himself ceased going to assemblies in the 1820s, but the public assemblies continued in the same location into the 1860s, which underlines that they had certainly not passed from fashion when Winter was writing.36 Boring or not, the level of attendance at the assemblies was quite high. The average number of attendees each Sunday was around 200, rising to an occasional peak of over 400. These figures only cover men, because women were allowed in free of charge when accompanied by husbands, fathers, sons or other male relatives. Because of this, the number of women at the assemblies is unknown. We can compare the assemblies to masquerades, which were also held in the Turku Assembly House and which brought together around 500–600 people at the best. This was also close to the maximum that Assembly House could hold and suggests that fortnightly assemblies attracted several hundred people from the social elite.37 This was an admirable achievement for a town that had between
134 Topi Artukka 12,000 and 14,000 inhabitants during the 1810s and 1820s, especially as there were competing attractions in the form of balls, dinners, concerts and theatre performances, many hosted at other commercial venues.38 At the peak of the season, an individual might have several such engagements in a week.39 As the Turku Academy’s associate professor Carl Nykopp commented in a letter written in 1814: ‘But I can tell you, that here, people have been dancing as if the end of the world was near’.40 The vast majority of those attending the assemblies came from the Turku’s resident elite. However, the company board deliberately encouraged participation by Russian officers by waiving the usual rule that men could only buy a season ticket at 14–20 roubles. Instead, they were allowed to purchase single admission tickets, at 1 rouble 75 kopeks per ticket, lowering the financial threshold of participation. The same exception was extended to include travellers, especially those who stayed in the Assembly House’s hotel accommodation. Both the Russian officers and travellers made good use of the right to engage in the assemblies, which gave them an opportunity to make the acquaintance of the local Turku elite.41 The Assembly House did not just passively offer its services: people working there actively created fresh attractions to lure people from both the town and those visiting or stationed there. Thus, the Assembly House acted as a physical environment that enabled and contributed to bringing new faces to elite social gatherings. Besides the assemblies, all the large and important balls, concerts, spectacles and major private celebrations were held in the Assembly House ballroom after it was completed in 1812. The building was adequate enough for Emperor Alexander I, who visited Turku in autumn 1819 and attended a ball arranged in his honour.42 When Turku Academy organised its degree ceremonies, the Assembly House was designated as the venue for the evening gala, and the same was true when the church or the Court of Appeal held large celebrations.43 These sporadic events were important for the Assembly House and its reputation, as they lifted the status of the place and underlined its position among the other leisure facilities in the town. At the same time, the hosts gained social capital by organising events in the great hall. These events were a refreshing supplement to the programme of assemblies around which the seasonal routines were built. The building itself needed such regular events in order to secure its position as the main venue for private as well as public celebrations. Luxurious premises were only effective if they were regularly filled with the Turku elite and visitors to the town.
Daily Life on the Premises Assemblies were an essential part of the elite’s social calendar, and their regularity gave a firm structure for both the assembly house itself and to local polite society. Yet, when it comes to the daily use of the Turku
Space, Sociability and Daily Life 135 Assembly House, the main customer flow came for the restaurant, the billiards room, the hotel and the Gentlemen’s Club, which all operated on the same premises. These services kept the building alive during the week and brought it into wider use in terms of both the quantity and social diversity of customers.44 One of the popular ways to manifest sociability in Europe was through different clubs and voluntary associations. These societies had disparate local characters, but the main idea behind the clubs was the same everywhere: to gather together people who had either the same social background or similar interests or who were otherwise familiar to each other.45 This was the case in Turku as well, where a gentleman’s club was founded in the 1810s.46 The exact year of foundation is unknown, but the club was in operation at least from November 1813. Johan Winter described in his journal that he participated in a club of friends or acquaintances, which assembled three times a week on the upper floor of the Assembly House.47 At first, the club was managed by an unofficial voluntary association: a group of active townsmen who valued the importance of an exclusive space and activities for men. After 1819, however, control was transferred from the group to the Turku Assembly House Company—a move initiated by members of the club, although most likely they were also company shareholders. The transition was seamless and the company continued to form an exclusive space for Turku’s male elite. The club was for members only, and in order to participate one needed to buy a season-long subscription at the cost of around fifteen roubles, although customers of the Assembly House hotel could also participate in the club’s merriments.48 The club has some similarities to those in England in terms of its daily activities. Its purpose was to provide a place for conversation, eating, drinking, gambling and reading—all part of the polite lifestyle fit for a gentleman.49 The club’s activities and practices were closely linked to daily life in the Assembly House. The upper floor of the building had several rooms and a billiard table, which were for the club’s use. Refreshments and food came from the restaurant kitchen downstairs, and maintenance was in the hands of Assembly House staff. From 1823 the re-established Turku Musical Society also began to rent rooms in the premises; they needed space to practice and perform, and the physical and cultural setting provided by the Assembly House was perfectly suited to their requirements.50 The company board had overall control of the Assembly House, but responsibility for running the restaurant and the hotel was outsourced to a manager, who rented the premises from the company. The business was fairly profitable to the company and hence to the Assembly House shareowners— but not for the manager of the restaurant and the hotel, who was constantly arguing with the board about financial issues and practicalities. The leaseholder changed four times in the 1810s, which reflects the lack
136 Topi Artukka of stability in rental relations, but the company owners considered the restaurant and hotel services so vital to the Assembly House that they kept the arrangement running. They even lent money to one of the managers so that he could accept the post.51 The restaurant was clearly not kept alive just for economic reasons and the money that came in from the rental agreement; it also had an important role in sociability. The early nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new restaurant and eating-out culture in Europe. The development started in late eighteenth-century Paris, where restaurants began to widen their offerings to a complete menu and remodel the concept of a restaurant as a business. They utilised novel ways to serve the customers by extending opening hours, offering set menus and individualised pricing and by giving diners more privacy by providing smaller dining rooms and most separate tables for small groups of customers. By doing this, restaurants not only established modern public dining experiences but also created a new kind of sociability by attracting new customers and changing the ways in which they interacted and socialised.52 Open daily, the Assembly House restaurant served lunch during the day and dinner in the evening. It also sold take-away meals for customers who, for whatever reason, did not want to dine in the restaurant.53 Johan Winter often ate alone in the Assembly House restaurant, seemingly preferring this to eating at home where he perhaps lacked facilities to prepare meals. Then again, there were many occasions when Winter was accompanied by his colleagues from the Court of Appeal or by other state officials, all of whom belonged to the urban elite. On other occasions, he went to the restaurant alone and found some suitable dining company.54 From Winter’s journal, it appears that the restaurant had the same kind of customers as the Assembly House and assemblies in general. However, given the routine nature of the visits recorded in his diary, it is unsurprising that Winter rarely paid attention to diners beyond his own group, so it is possible that it attracted a slightly wider social range of patrons. Winter himself generally alternated between lunches and dinners, although he sometimes ate in the restaurant twice during the day. Restaurant dining was a social experience and increasingly became part of the culture of politeness. Moreover, it was an essential instrument in maintaining one’s social networks: an extension of traditional practices of hospitality. With small groups, it was customary to treat colleagues to breakfast or dinner or to buy a bottle of wine to drink with the meal. Politeness and status building insisted that occasionally one had to treat a larger crowd with dinner and drinks. Private rooms in the Assembly House restaurant served these purposes, especially as they offered possibilities for enhancing group cohesion in private and intimate surroundings.55 For example, in August 1816, Winter wrote in his diary, how I invited R[åbergh] and his wife to dine with me to the Assembly House . . . managed to book a room from there with help of O. H.
Space, Sociability and Daily Life 137 and after the [court] session I went there at half two with Holmberg and Hirn. We were given young B’s room, where Sofi was serving. Some food from the menu, two bottles of red wine, a bowl of bisshof, from where we drank good toasts for the new offspring of R’s relatives, coffee and after clearing the table, yet another bowl that kept us in a good mood until 5 pm.56 In short, the group enjoyed an afternoon of conviviality at the Assembly House, hosted and presumably all paid for by Winter. During assemblies and on special occasions, the restaurant was reserved for the people and corporations who had hired the whole building. For example, when the Court of Appeal celebrated its 200th year anniversary in 1823, over 400 lawyers, their wives and other invited guests gathered in the Assembly House. After several quadrilles, cotillions, waltzes and similar dances, a dinner was served to the guests. Rooms in the ground floor were set for dining: women congregated in the three main dining rooms and men in the other three rooms. For every room there was a hostess, who represented a high position in the local elite. After the dinner, dancing continued upstairs in the ballroom.57 The Assembly House restaurant was thus a place that connected sumptuous balls and masquerades and the everyday dining arrangements of genteel society. At the same time the whole building and its reputation among polite society gave a certain legitimacy to the restaurant. It became socially accepted to dine in the restaurant and to host smaller events and dinners for associates and members of the elite.58 These practices became more popular also because of the population structure in Turku after 1809. After the establishment of the Grand Duchy, there was a growing number of unmarried civil servants in Turku.59 Many of them lived as tenants without any cooking facilities or kitchen maids, making impossible the sociability of dinner parties or other larger social gatherings in their apartments. The Assembly House restaurant afforded one of a handful of venues for respectable dining. Furthermore, the restaurant offered facilities for leisure activities beyond eating in company. It had a billiards room, which invited people to spend more time in the premises and obviously to consume more services.60 Billiards had been a popular game since the end of the eighteenth century, when the game found its way to Turku.61 It attracted not just players and gamblers but also spectators, who arrived at the Assembly House simply to watch others play. Billiards were meant to be an entertainment for the players and thus customers, but daily life adapted the concept as it developed into something that attracted the polite society as spectators, too. Watching people play was as routine as playing. It is clear the game had larger social meaning than just competing with one another.62 Sociability was also an essential part of the facilities in the smaller rooms, which diners could rent for their own purposes. This paradoxically increased both the social character of the restaurant and
138 Topi Artukka the private experience of eating and drinking, as smaller groups distanced themselves from the more public parts of the restaurant. At the same time, these customers experienced a more profound sense of community inside their private room and around the billiards tables. In addition to this, eating alone was also acceptable, as the Assembly House restaurant offered small tables for either groups or individuals. Very similar arguments can be made about the Assembly House hotel, of which there are only a few indirect remarks in the company’s archives. The hotel had eighteen rooms in total, in two wooden houses. The hotel was tied to the restaurant and operated under the same lease.63 The only thing the hotel had restrictions on was the length of the time visitors could stay, as it was forbidden to rent a room for longer than one year. The Assembly House took travellers into special account by offering them the chance to participate in the assemblies and club activities without needing to pay a subscription. This made good business sense, but behind this was also a wish to momentarily widen the elite milieu, opening up the town’s social life by bringing fresh faces to the assemblies.64 We know from other sources that the visitors who stayed in the Turku Assembly House hotel were mostly foreign genteel travellers, so they formed part of the same transnational European elite that characterised Turku.65 By dancing in the assemblies and playing cards in the club, they both took part in and helped to shape Turku polite society’s daily life and routines.
Conclusion: An Assemblage of Spaces Turku and the vibrant social life of its elite provide an interesting viewpoint on early nineteenth-century sociability and elite social history more generally. In Turku, polite society had an active and dynamic social life in elevating surroundings. An important and essential part of this cosmopolitan way of elite living was the Assembly House, which offered a stage for sociability, complete with lavish and novel settings. The house—and the company that ran it—created several different attractions for polite society and constituted key elements of sociability in the town. In consequence of this, the Turku Assembly House became central to polite society’s daily life. This was founded on the different routines and social practices of sociability that reflected the similar ways of sociability as elsewhere in Europe in early nineteenth century. The Assembly House was a large stone building but also an assemblage of distinct spaces. Some of them were more apparent, some only visible to visitors familiar with the routines and customs of the house. It included separate rooms and facilities, each of them built around and facilitating different types of social gathering and therefore different practices of sociability. The building and especially its assemblies formed a headquarters for the urban festivities in which the polite society took part, and the large ballroom and the rooms next to it were transformed according to the occasion. The downstairs dining room created a new
Space, Sociability and Daily Life 139 kind of social space for everyday elite conviviality. Besides passing time, this also enhanced important social networks and perhaps opened some new business ventures and opportunities. Such routines and practices maintained the structures and spaces of polite society. These daily routines were orchestrated by the company board, elected by and from Turku’s elite. The board set the rules and regulations for the assemblies and for the restaurateur, who worked under a contract for the company. However, the routines of the Assembly House were not simply created by orders passed from above: company regulation alongside Finnish legislation gave the broader framework for polite society to create their daily routines and practices. These were enacted during the assemblies and dinners, in the meetings of clubs and societies, and around the billiards table. Thus, while the material spaces of the Turku Assembly House facilitated and moulded the social practices and culture of polite society, these practices were constantly remodelling the House itself. Sociability and the culture of politeness in Turku were part of a broader European culture in which assembly rooms played a key part. The founders of the Turku Assembly House looked outside the borders of the Grand Duchy when they started to plan their building, and it subsequently formed part of a wide network of similar institutions across Europe. They were linked by their architecture and a common social culture: Turku’s polite society breathed the same cosmopolitan air and upheld the same customs as did their counterparts in Sweden—but also in England, France and elsewhere. This transnational phenomenon— international elite culture combined with local characteristics—makes the Turku Assembly House an interesting example of how widespread the culture of politeness was in early nineteenth-century Europe.
Notes 1. ‘Om eftermiddagen var [det] assemblé i Societetshuset. Jag gick upp för att se denna stadens sköna [byggnad]. Krogius vilken jag åtföljde var utom Lethin den enda som jag kände bland studenterna. I ett rum dit man först ingick, to 4 á 5 karlar emot kapprockar, galoscher och hattar samt gav ett nummer, vilket man fick behålla. Sedermera passerade man åter några rum, då man kom till den som sålde biljetter, sedan jag fått mig en sådan ingick jag i salen som var ansenligt stor. Kort därpå begynte musiken, som satt högt upp på en läktare att dåna förfärligt. Den bestod av 15 musikanter. Polonäs begyntes, vem som ville tog sin dam, spatserade en stund och slutade, härav hände ibland inget, ibland många par var på golvet’. Carl Axel Gottlund’s diary 6.3.1814, Carl Axel Gottlunds dagbok 1808–1817, ed. Lars Lundin (Järvsö 2015). 2. The research for the chapter has been funded by the project Over the Sea— Cultural Interaction Between the University Towns Turku and Uppsala, 1640–1828, Svenska Kulturfonden 2019–2020 (project number 26004715) and Turku Urban Research Programme 2019–2020 (26004703). 3. See for example John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: The English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc, 1997); James van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jane Rendell,
140 Topi Artukka ‘Almack’s Assembly Rooms—A Site of Sexual Pleasure’, Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 3 (2002): 136–49; Joonas Korhonen, ‘Urban Social Space and the Development of Public Dance Hall Culture in Vienna, 1780–1814’, Urban History 40, no. 4 (2013): 606–24; Dag Lindström, ‘Leisure Culture, Entrepreneurs and Urban Space: Swedish Towns in a European Perspective, Eighteenth-nineteenth Centuries’, in Leisure Cultures in Urban Europe c. 1700–1870. A Transnational Perspective, ed. Peter Borsay and Jan Hein Furnée (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 140–60; My Hellsing, ‘ “We Had a Row on the Politics of the Day.” Gender and Political Sociability of the Elites in Stockholm, c. 1770–1800’, in The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience, ed. Deborah Simonton (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 195–204; Charlotta Wolff, ‘Opera-Comique, Cultural Politics and Identity in Scandinavia 1760–1800’, Scandinavian Journal of History 43, no. 3 (2018): 387–409. 4. Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance. Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 311–20. See also Peter Borsay, ‘The English Urban Renaissance: The Development of Provincial Urban Culture c. 1680—c. 1760’, in The Eighteenth Century Town 1688–1820. A Reader in English Urban History, ed. Peter Borsay (London and New York: Longman, 1990). 5. Peter Clark, ‘Introduction’, in Small Towns in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Clark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19–20; Rendell, ‘Almack’s Assembly Rooms’, 136; Paul R. Keenan, ‘Card-playing and Gambling in Eighteenth-century Russia’, European History Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2012): 389–91; Korhonen, ‘Urban Social Space’, 607. 6. Topi Artukka, ‘Konstruktionen av ett urbant sällskapsliv. Åbo Societetshus som centrum för societeten i början av 1800-talet’, Historisk Tidskrift för Finland 102, no 3 (2018). 7. Eva-Christina Mäkeläinen, Säätyläisten seuraelämä ja tapakulttuuri 1700luvun jälkipuoliskolla Turussa, Viaporissa ja Savon kartanoalueella (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1972), 105–208; Artukka, ‘Konstruktionen av ett urbant sällskapsliv’, 400–3. 8. Artukka, ‘Konstruktionen av ett urbant sällskapsliv’, 396–405. For history of Turku Assembly House see also Åsa Ringbom, Societetshusen i storfurstendömet Finland (Helsingfors: Finska Fornminnesföreningens tidskrift, 1988). Turku’s position in Baltic Sea region see Panu Savolainen, ‘The Meaning of Urban Centrality in a Medium-Sized Eighteenth-Century Town’, Sjuttonhundratal. Nordic Yearbook for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2018): 62–67. 9. Thomas F. Gieryn, ‘What Buildings Do’, Theory and Society 31 (2002): 35. 10. Dag Lindström have made the same kind of notion regarding the Linköping Assembly House. See Dag Lindström, ‘Bland lindansare, oskyldiga nöjen och offentliga bakverk. Assemblé och spektakelhuset i Linköping’, in Nation så in i Norden—Festskrift till Torkel Jansson, ed. Henrik Edgren (Skellefteå: Artos & Norma, 2013), 155. 11. The Turku Assembly House Company’s share issue lists 1810–1812, company minutes 1811–1825, The Turku Assembly House Company’s archive, Turku City Archive (here after TCA); Artukka, ‘Konstruktionen av ett urbant sällskapsliv’, 403–7. 12. The Turku Assembly House Company’s share issue lists 1810–1812. 13. Per Schybergsson, Aktiebolagsformens genombrott i Finland: utvecklingen före 1895 års lag (Helsingfors: Finska vetenskaps-societeten, 1964), 22–23, 123–31. For the development of Finnish assembly house institution see Ringbom, Societetshusen.
Space, Sociability and Daily Life 141 14. Mark Girouard, The English Town (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 136–37; Rendell, ‘Almack’s Assembly Rooms’, 141. See also Lindström, ‘Bland lindansare’, 143. 15. The Turku Assembly House Company’s fire policy insurance 1816, Ha:6, Finnish Fire Policy Insurance Office archive, The National Archives of Finland (here after NAF). 16. Ibid. 17. Girouard, The English Town, 137–44. 18. My Hellsing, ‘Hertiginnan, hovet och staden i det gustavianska Stockholm’, Sjuttonhundratal (2013): 103–12; Lindström, ‘Leisure Culture’, 140–41, 148, 156–57; Hellsing, ‘Gender and Political Sociability’, 200–1; Artukka, ‘Konstruktionen av ett urbant sällskapsliv’, 400. 19. Borsay, English Urban Renaissance, 160–61; Lindström, ‘Bland lindansare’, 153–54. 20. For polite society’s social calendar in the eighteenth century, see, for example, Hannah Greig, The Beau Monde. Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 95–98. 21. Assembly regulations, the Turku Assembly House company’s account book 1818, The Turku Assembly House Company’s archive, TCA; Board minutes 23.8.1816 and 13.12.1822, company minutes 1811–1825, The Turku Assembly House Company’s archive, TCA. 22. Brewer, Pleasures, 547; Lindström, ‘Bland lindansare’, 147–49; Jennifer Davey, ‘ “Wearing the Breeches”? Almack’s, the Female Patroness, and Public Femininity c.1764–1848’, Womens History Review 26, no 6 (2017): 826–27. 23. Johan Winter’s diary 1.12.1816, 16.11.1817, 18.1.1818 and 7.3.1819, J. P. Winter’s archive, NAF; Carl Axel Gottlund’s diary 27.3.1815, Lundin (2015). 24. ‘mot 8. gick upp på klubben, där mycket folk samlats i riktig trängsel’. Johan Winter’s diary 1.2.1818. For smaller crowds, see Johan Winter’s diary 26.12.1816 and 15.12.1816. 25. Johan Winter’s diary 17.11.1814, 25.4.1816 and 31.1.1822. 26. Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter. Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press 1998), 239– 42; Rendell, ‘Almack’s Assembly Rooms’, 136–38; Lindström, ‘Leisure Culture’, 147–48; Davey, ‘Wearing the Breeches’, 827–30. 27. Rental agreement with the restaurateur, company minute 26.6.1819, company minutes 1811–1825, The Turku Assembly House Company’s archive, TCA. Assembly regulations, the Turku Assembly House company’s account book 1818, The Turku Assembly House Company’s archive, TCA; Assembly accounts, the Turku Assembly House company’s account book 1817, Societeets-bolag, Topographica T Turku, NAF (Turku). 28. Assembly regulations, the Turku Assembly House company’s account book 1818. 29. Ibid. 30. Elizabeth Claire, ‘Monstrous Choreographies: Waltzing, Madness, and Miscarriage’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 38 (2009): 199–235; Korhonen, “Urban Social Space,” 608–9. 31. Topi Artukka, ‘Valssin pyörteissä. Tanssi ja Turun seurapiirit 1800-luvun alussa’, in Kaupungin varjoissa, arkistojen valossa, ed. Topi Artukka, Jarkko Keskinen, and Taina Saarenpää (Turku: Sigillum, 2018). 32. Marjorie Morgan, Manners, Morals and Class in England 1774–1858 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 13–30; Vickery, Gentleman’s Daughter, 196–202; Greig, Beau Monde., 238–40. See also Borsay, The Urban Renaissance, 300–8.
142 Topi Artukka 33. Assembly regulations, the Turku Assembly House company’s account book 1818. 34. ‘gick ½ 9 på klubben, församlingen var i dag ej talrik—mindre förnäm’. Johan Winter’s diary 10 January 1819. 35. ‘[B]ra nog’ Johan Winter’s diary 16 November 1817. 36. Åbo Underrättelser 26 January 1855, 15 December 1860 and November 14, 1865. 37. Assembly accounts, the Turku Assembly House company’s account book 1818; Assembly accounts, the Turku Assembly House company’s account book 1817. 38. Turku population registration 1815 and 1825, K01A:3–4, Archives of the Statistical head office, NAF. 39. See for example N.H. Pinellos letter to Gustaf Aminoff 5 February 1818, vol. 36, Riilahti I, NAF; Gustaf Heinricius, Från samhällslifvet i Åbo 1809– 1827: kultur- och personhistoriska skildringar (Helsingfors, Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 1914), 116–17. 40. ‘Det kan jag likväl berätta, att här dansats, så man trott att det skulle bli verldens sista tiden’. Carl Gustav Nykopp’s letter to E.A. Crohns 4 February 1814, B:3, Samuel Möller’s archive, NAF. 41. Assembly accounts, the Turku Assembly House company’s account book 1818. 42. Johan Winter’s diary 8.—14 September 1819. 43. Johan Winter’s draft letter to Johan Fredrik Richter 13 December 1823; Åbo Allmänna Tidning 13 November 1817; Åbo Tidningar 9 July 1825, 14 October 1826 and 11 July 1827. 44. From Gentlemen’s Club see more Topi Artukka, ‘Informationsförmedlingens knutpunkter—den muntliga kommunikationens rum i det tidiga 1800-talets Åbo’, Historisk Tidskrift för Finland 104, no 1 (2019): 87–96. 45. See for example Henrik Stenius, Frivilligt jämlikt samfällt: föreningsväsendets utveckling i Finland fram till 1900-talets början med speciell hänsyn till massorganisationsprincipens genombrott (Helsinki: Svenska Litteratursällskapet, 1987); Carol Harrison, The Bourgeois Citizen in Nineteenth-Century France. Gender, Sociability, and the Uses of Emulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800. The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 46. The club had several different names written in the company’s minutes, which indicates that club didn’t have an official name and structure. 47. Johan Winters diary 1 November 1813; Åbo Allmänna Tidning 27 January 1814. 48. Board minutes 19 February 1819 and 5 March 1819 and annual general meetings minutes 27 February 1819, 31 March 1821 and 12 June 1822, company minutes 1811–1825, The Turku Assembly House Company’s archive, TCA. 49. Johan Winters diary 1 November 1813. 50. Board minutes 5 March 1819, 26 June 1819, 24 September 1819, 16 September 1822 and 15 January 1823, company minutes 1811–1825, The Turku Assembly House Company’s archive, TCA. 51. For Finnish restaurateurs see Marjatta Rahikainen, ‘Urban opportunities: Women in the restaurant business in Swedish and Finnish cities, c. 1800– 1850’, in Early Professional Women in Northern Europe, c. 1650–1850, ed. Johanna Ilmakunnas, Marjatta Rahikainen, and Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen (New York: Routledge, 2018). 52. Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant. Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2001), 64–87.
Space, Sociability and Daily Life 143 3. Carl Axel Gottlund’s diary 20 October 1814. 5 54. Johan Winter’s diary 18 November 1815, 2 December 1815, 14 December 1815, 10 April 1816, 18 May 1816 and 5 September 1816. 55. Johan Winter’s diary 29 October 1813, 16 December 1813, 17 January 1814, 3 March 1814, 1 December 1815, 26 January 1816, 15 October 1816 and 13 January 1819. 56. ‘Jag bad R. jemte dess fru äta med mig på societeten, der de ha qvarter, lät genom O. H. beställa ett rum där, och efter slutad session gick jag kl. ½ 2. jemte Holmberg och Hirn ner. Vi fingo här uti yngre B:s rum, uppassade af Sofi, litet mat efter sedel, 2. buteljer röd vin, en bål bisshof, hvarav goda skålar drackos äfven för R:ska slägters förökning, kaffe och efter bordets aflagning än en bål, som höll oss vid god mod till kl. 5’. Johan Winter’s diary 5 August 1816. 57. Johan Winter’s draft letter to Johan Fredrik Richter 3 December 1823. 58. Johan Winter’s diary 1 December 1815, 14 December 1815, 5 September 1816; 13 January 1819 and 5 August 1819. 59. Raimo Savolainen, Keskusvirastolinnakkeista virastoarmeijaksi. Senaatin ja valtioneuvoston alainen keskushallinto Suomessa 1809–1995 (Helsinki: Hallintohistoriakomitea 1996), 14–17, 70–88, 465–66. 60. The Turku Assembly House Company’s fire policy insurance 1816. 61. Anthony Cross, By the Banks of the Neva: Chapters from the Lives and Careers of the British in Eighteenth-Century Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 26–27; Leif Runefelt, Att hasta mot undergången: anspråk, flyktighet, förställning i debatten om konsumtion i Sverige 1730– 1830 (Stockholm: Nordic Academic Press, 2015), 157–58; Panu Savolainen, Teksteistä rakennettu kaupunki: julkinen ja yksityinen tila turkulaisessa kielenkäytössä ja arkielämässä 1740–1810 (Turku: Sigillum, 2017), 165, 168. 62. Carl Axel Gottlund’s diary 11 February 1815 and 12 March 1815; Johan Winter’s diary 27 October 1815 and 17 February 1816. 63. The Turku Assembly House Company’s fire policy insurance 1816. 64. Board minutes 5 March 1819, 26 June 1819, 16 September 1822, company minutes 1811–1825, The Turku Assembly House Company’s archive, TCA. 65. Police registers for arriving foreigners 1812–1819, He:2, Administrative Department for General Management archive, NAF.
7 Kaleidoscopic Spaces Slices of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century Edo Bébio Amaro
The period between 1850 and 1880 was one of dramatic changes in Japanese society, especially for the inhabitants of the feudal metropolis of Edo, as they watched it morph into the modern capital of Tokyo.1 This transformation—spurred by the unequal treaties imposed by Commodore Perry and Townsend Harris—was multifaceted, involving regroupings of social actors together with the repurposing of spaces. Edo was a city where hierarchy mattered considerably, with zones assigned to those of higher status (feudal clans, samurai, religious institutions), middle status (commoners, merchants, farmers), and very low status (low castes). In Edo’s early years during the late sixteenth century, these zones already had their own character and sets of spatial practices, and people actively avoided staying too long in zones that did not match their designated social status.2 This situation continued largely unchallenged for roughly 250 years of mostly peaceful rule by the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), in what is also known as the ‘Edo period’. Most scholars agree that the Edo period, especially its later half from the early eighteenth century onwards, was marked by strong consistencies in terms of institutions, systems of rule, and economic, social, and cultural aspects, making it akin to an ancien régime that outlasted those found in Europe by a number of decades.3 In Edo, everyone was subject to surveillance in a variety of ways. The wives and children of feudal lords had been kept as hostages to prevent rebellions, and the boundaries of the city were strictly monitored for this purpose, its female inhabitants living as semi-inmates within an urbansized jail. In particular, noblewomen lived their lives far away from the public eye, travelling in enclosed palanquins whenever possible. The population of Edo was skewed towards the male gender: besides the many armed samurai serving the lords, large numbers of disaffected young men moved into the city to make an easy life as palanquin carriers, boatmen, street performers or store clerks; many of them ended up living hedonistic lives focused on tattooing, smoking, gambling, drinking alcohol, and frequenting tea houses or brothels. Taking into account all of the aforementioned, the purpose of this chapter is to elucidate the intersections between urban structure and
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 145 topography with spatial practices and forms of social organisation during the later years of Edo. How did different social groups choose to distribute themselves over a given landscape, and how did they appropriate it? How did factors such as location, urban density, and transport connectivity affect the types of everyday spatial practices that occurred in each place? In order to explore these questions, a number of personal diaries and writings by foreign sojourners and Japanese residents are analysed. While foreigners provided varied descriptions of ordinary life as it unfolded before them, there were several factors that sometimes prevented them from grasping the full picture: the paradoxical suspicion and friendly curiosity of the Japanese themselves; the frequent escorting by Japanese guards; the traps of exoticism; a lack of awareness of the inner workings of certain social groups (especially those engaged in illegal activities); and the desire to protect one’s own career by ‘sanitizing’ the texts from any controversial or reprehensible remarks. As for the selected Japanese writings, these generally neglect to describe everyday spatial practices or street scenes—which are taken for granted—but they do contain travel destinations, the names of people whom they encountered, lists of daily work tasks, and information about their hobbies and leisure activities. This constitutes helpful information with which to compare the writings of foreign visitors, especially since a lot can slip by undetected if one focuses on the diary writings of a single person. These limitations make the task of describing the daily lives of Edo challenging—but not unfeasible. A given space can mean several things to different people, and it can be appropriated in different ways during the course of a day. The more variety there is in the forms of appropriation and interpretation, the more ‘multi-layered’ or ‘kaleidoscopic’ the space becomes. Based upon the contents of the selected writings, this chapter identifies certain types of zones that have a unique, distinctive character (although of a kaleidoscopic nature in certain cases) and offers insights into the relationships between site and spatial practice by people of different classes, genders and ages. This is not to say that a view of environmental determinism is being adopted here; rather, that human agency and urban environment are to be recognised as important actors, slowly working towards modifying each other.
Participating Actors in the Network: Foreigners and ‘Edoites’, Plus Edo Itself The first batch of selected writings comes from Francis Hall (selected period: 1860–66), Ernest Satow (1862–69), Algernon Freeman-Mitford (1866–70), and Charles Longfellow (1871–73).4 They were among the last visitors to witness Edo in its primarily feudal state, despite the fact that they were often gazed at just as heavily as they gazed at others, if not more. Our second batch of writings involves Henry Faulds (1874–85),
146 Bébio Amaro Clara Whitney (1875–79) and Isabella Bird (1878).5 These describe the bizarre state of cultural hybridity visible in Tokyo; yet, if one searched carefully, it was still possible to find groups or individuals who, to some extent, maintained and preserved the old practices. Hall, Satow, and Longfellow came to Japan out of a sense of fascination, romance, or adventure and ended up getting involved either partially or fully in diplomatic affairs for Great Britain and the United States. Mitford arrived from Peking under orders to serve as secretary to the British Legation but ended up becoming quite fond of the country, despite some dangerous encounters with armed samurai on the street. While Faulds, a medical physician, came to Japan together with his wife and had little free time outside of clinical practice, Satow, Hall, Longfellow, and Mitford lived semi-secret lives either flirting or having sexual adventures with Japanese damsels and geisha in teahouses, parties, or other locations. The writings of Hall stand out in particular for his thorough and lengthy depiction of outdoor scenes, likewise those of Longfellow for his portrayal of the city’s pleasurable life in teahouses, gardens, and boats. Clara Whitney, who came to Japan at the age of fifteen and worked as an English tutor for children, was highly devoted to the Bible and notions of ladylike chaste behaviour, but she too could not resist engaging in occasional flirtations with both Japanese and foreign men. Out of all the writers, she was the one who best described the lives of the elite, as she and her family established a close friendship with a former retainer family headed by an important official named Katsu Kaishū and lived inside their main residence for more than two years in a purpose-built house. Isabella Bird came primarily to regain her health but stayed for about a year, very much wanting to explore and experience parts of Japan that were still uncontaminated by foreign cultures, and she is notable for her depictions of Asakusa Temple as well as her sensitivity to the city’s sounds. Having just arrived at the foreign treaty port of Yokohama, filled with filthy streets, drab buildings and raucous, troublesome foreigners, Bird could hardly wait to see the ‘real Japan’.6 Japanese perspectives are represented here by the diaries of one woman, Kuroda Tosako (relevant diary periods: 1717 and 1735–53) and three men: Saitō Gesshin (1830); Shibata Shūzō (1850); and Sakai Hanjirō (1860).7 Kuroda was the widow of a feudal lord, thus making her a member of the elite class. In her youth, she resented the constant surveillance placed upon her by the shogunate and relished any opportunity to evade it. After being widowed and seeing her children turn into independent adults, she decided to become a tonsured devotee of Buddhism and embarked on numerous visits to relatives so as to maintain good relationships among everyone. Saitō was a commoner charged with supervising a handful of streets as a neighbourhood chief, which afforded him a very good position within the overall hierarchical structure. Besides patrolling and monitoring his neighbourhood, he had to receive numerous people in his house and visit
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 147 many others every day for the sake of courtesy as well as work matters. His diary is primarily a work tool, and each entry is so concise as to be almost telegraphic; nevertheless, the volume of entries is quite considerable. Despite registering a few encounters with geisha while visiting other people, he seemed to have stayed away from the most disreputable parts of Edo. In general, both Kuroda and Saitō lived their daily lives mostly confined to social spheres defined by their class and status and remained largely ignorant of major developments occurring outside of Japan. Shibata was a lower-level commoner, the son of a fisherman who travelled a long way to Edo in 1850 to be educated as a medical practitioner and blissfully indulged himself in its hedonistic nightlife of sake and women, while gradually becoming aware of vague rumours concerning the encroachment of Western powers upon East Asian territories. Although his writing is not quite as minimalistic as that of Saitō, he is still largely unconcerned with describing daily scenes in any sort of vivid detail. Finally, Sakai was a samurai who arrived on a temporary basis in 1860 to work for an important feudal lord. In his walks, he had already seen at least a few exotic faces roaming around the streets of the city, although he could barely be bothered to provide his impression of the incoming foreigners: just a dry note stating that, despite having different outer looks, all men on Earth seem to share the same fascination with sexual customs and mores.8 Overall, his writing style is reasonably similar to that of Shibata. Formally established in the late 1590s at the exact threshold between a hilly area and a vast, shallow bay (Figure 7.1), Edo’s humble pre-existing castle facilities were significantly expanded with a combination of natural water courses and artificial moats generating a spiral network that reached into the sea, allowing for extensive navigation by small flat boats. Edo’s early layout combined two important models of sixteenthcentury urban planning: first, that of the concentric ‘medieval castletown’, by which feudal lords and retainers were forced to build their residences in the areas delimited by the spiralling water canals, with the degree of proximity to the castle determined by one’s rank. The second was that of Chinese notions of geomancy for the sake of selecting an auspicious site worthy of a ruler: by surveying the landscape around the site and associating its geographical features with mythical creatures and animals that represented the cardinal directions, strategies were devised for strengthening the site from disastrous or inappropriate energies. Of particular note are the southeast and west: the large Sumida River represents the protective figure of the dragon, while the long Tōkaidō Road that connected Edo with Kyoto symbolises a tiger. As it was considered that the site was somewhat unprotected from negative energies arriving from the northeast, the religious districts of Ueno, Asakusa, and Atago were respectively established as major protective buffer zones on top of three conspicuous hills.9
148 Bébio Amaro
Figure 7.1 Schematic map of Edo circa 1850–80, compiled by the author from various sources (see note 9). Note: For reasons of topographical legibility, the residential zones of feudal lords and their retainers (which comprise most of the city’s land use) are represented merely as empty space enveloping the commoner and temple zones.
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 149 The geographical contiguity of these religious sites with the Tōkaidō, the Sumida, and the canal network worked synergistically towards generating an attractive area for economic activities. Since feudal lords and warriors (daimyō and samurai) had primacy in occupying the best and safest sites in the hilly areas and were forced to live in the capital under a system of alternate attendance (sankin kōtai),10 the masses of commoners who came in search of economic opportunities had little choice but to landfill and occupy the low-lying marshes and sand dunes around the Tōkaidō, thereby generating an urban tissue of considerable density. While Edo grew at a frenetic pace during the first century of its existence, from the 1720s onward the city’s population finally began to stabilise, and its outer boundaries would not suffer any significant changes until the 1880s. Likewise, by the mid-eighteenth century, Edo’s urban structure was essentially fixed, thus making it feasible to analyse a set of diaries and written materials spanning such a long period as the ones included here.11 From the overall descriptions of Edo’s daily life found in the analysed writings, five major types of zones can be identified as having a unique character, both in their topography and their everyday life: (1) the dense districts mainly reserved for commoners; (2) the broad estates of the daimyō and samurai; (3) the temple areas that integrated various forms of entertainment and commerce; (4) border towns defined by inns, teahouses, and brothels; and (5) the vast water network of moats, canals, rivers, bridges, and the sea.
Low-Height Zones: The Semi-Exposed and Vibrant Lives of Commoners The first aspect that is invariably mentioned by foreigners in their initial walks through Edo was how noisy, vibrant and busy the commoner streets were, whereas the daimyō district streets were often quieter, cleaner, and sparse in the number of passers-by. This statement is often followed by the clear contrast between the considerable visibility of inner spaces in the stores and homes of commoners, while daimyō streets were merely endless rows of monotonous tall walls interrupted by the occasional decorated gate, with its owners acting more like inmates rather than actual lords. Henry Faulds wrote about the episodes of domestic violence, sexual intercourse, or drunkenness that could be perceived by people walking outside commoner dwellings: A great deal of Japanese life is passed in the streets, and can best be seen there. . . . The houses are open from floor to roof in warm weather, and concealment is nearly impossible; and at night, when the paper windows are drawn closely together, you may see many a painful tragedy or side-splitting comedy enacted in shadow by the unconscious inmates.12
150 Bébio Amaro Commoner land plots around the Tōkaidō were mostly composed of narrow and deep storehouses tightly packed together (the so-called nagaya). The sliding doors and windows of the buildings were not fitted with glass but rather a thin sheet of paper, which, when combined with oil lamps, made the shadows of its occupants visible to outsiders after dusk (such architecture was devoid of curtains). The store space at the ground level functioned like an extension of the actual house: for most small businesses, the lack of space meant that the store-owning family had to conduct daily house chores and take care of children within the house, while maintaining a direct visual connection with the store space and the main road in the event that a customer decided to enter and check some goods. Thin wooden walls further ensured that just about any sound made within the house could be heard outside. Water wells and toilets would be located in a small area located more towards the middle or back part of the nagaya and were sometimes accessible to residents in the neighbouring houses, which would certainly propitiate moments of daily social interaction.13 Faulds wrote also that the relatively quiet small side alleys or back alleys were used as everyday working spaces, and women could be seen dyeing clothes or raising poultry, for instance.14 Returning to the public space of the streets, their flat topography and outstretching length connecting the southwestern Atago Hill with the north-eastern temples of Asakusa and Ueno provided ample opportunities for mobile businesses and professions. By attaching light wooden shelves and furniture to both ends of a wooden pole, numerous types of lone street sellers could operate throughout the city. Both Hall and Faulds noted how many of these mobile businesses, street peddling, and entertainment services were geared towards young children, many of whom were too poor to attend school but possessed some disposable income and were often free to roam around the streets in groups.15 Hall was especially struck with the mundane. He wrote that, even in the early morning, the Tōkaidō was already full of travellers, with men and women on foot trudging merrily; most women were attired for travelling and, when not attended by a servant to carry their baggage, they had an umbrella in one hand and a little pack on their backs. Soldiers armed with swords could be seen swaggering around. Another distinctive feature was the trotting pace of many tattooed young men carrying palanquins with high-ranking passengers. Hall called the passengers ‘inmates’ due to the considerable discomfort of being sealed in a narrow box, shielded from light and air. Here and there he could see a riding party moving easily and at leisure on horseback or some dignitary official approaching the imperial city by palanquin accompanied by a vast retinue of people. Cargo was being carried everywhere, with pack horses laden with straw, boxes, or baskets and several coolies supporting heavy burdens on both sides of a bamboo pole. Nimbly rushing by were dispatch bearers on the way to the great city holding a bamboo pole with
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 151 boxes of letters on both ends. Last, Hall noticed a small travelling group of females, likely on a group excursion to some temple area. There was an elderly woman with sober garments taking the lead. The second lady walking behind her was young and pretty; Hall realised that she was the mistress of a merchant friend of his. The rear of the party was taken by a well-dressed man with a sword, since it was customary to have a servant employed to travel with a group of females.16 At night, all of our foreign observers pointed out the many street vendors dealing with toys, fruits, and flowers or the vast profusion of paper lanterns filled with imaginative illustrations, especially in the districts around the bridge of Nihonbashi—considered the central point of Japan from which all distances are measured (Figure 7.2). People easily remained in the street up until around midnight, especially during the hot seasons, because the streets were kept somewhat cooler than the houses due to partially stagnant water flowing through the side channels of streets.17 Longfellow added that the streets at night were crowded with men, women and children . . . too poor to own or hire a boat to lie on the river in. Under every bridge, there would be a laughing and splashing and bobbing of black heads of fellows swimming in the canals.18 While foreigners duly noticed the sheer dominance of sake-drinking activities, the act of walking around the city for the purpose of improving oneself as a gourmet and eating the latest novelties was a widespread commoner hobby that appears to have gone unnoticed, perhaps because most
Figure 7.2 The fish market around the Nihonbashi Bridge. Woodblock print Nihon-bashi uoichi han’ei no zu by Kuniyoshi, late Edo period. Source: The Landmarks of Edo in Color Woodblock Prints, National Diet Library.
152 Bébio Amaro foreigners struggled to enjoy Japanese cuisine. If we look at the diaries of the commoners Saitō and Shibata (as well as the samurai Sakai), it is immediately apparent that all of them were passionate about exploring notable restaurants and teahouses around the city and trying out all of their specialties. They never fail to write down the various types of buckwheat noodles, rice cakes, and sweets that they tried on each trip and possessed a level of detailed knowledge about Edo cuisine that is missing in any of the foreigners’ writings, because they had different daily experiences of eating. Visitors’ descriptions of the lives of adult Japanese men seem accurate enough. Our three Japanese men got heavily drunk on occasion (Shibata much more than the others). Saitō, having lived all his life in Edo, was a family man, and so when he went out at night it was mostly to drink at the homes of his colleagues or brothers-in-law. Shibata and Sakai, having arrived much more recently, enjoyed going out on the streets at night respectively with fellow students and samurai (all men), often moving from one drinking place to another.
High-Status Zones: The Secluded Yet Monitored Lives of the daimyō and Their Retainers The extent to which the elite sought to shield themselves from extensive contact with the commoner and lower classes is notable throughout the history of Edo. This involved not just building broad compounds with high walls (Figure 7.3), but also employing an array of servants and samurai that partly functioned as human buffers for dealing directly with merchants and beggars who generally only dared to enter the daimyō streets for relatively short periods of time. Whitney, Hall, and Sakai mention dealing with visiting itinerant merchants and other sorts of workers on an almost daily basis (primarily in the morning), but while Sakai seems to find this practice convenient and natural, Hall is quite amused, noting how every morning after breakfast at the American Legation, the merchants came and turned the dining room into an ‘antique shop’ with products sold at exorbitant prices, forcing everyone to constantly negotiate for a fairer price.19 While the Whitneys and the Katsus would host various types of events within the residence, a certain pattern can be ascertained from analysing Whitney’s many descriptions. After the guests arrived and gathered in the waiting areas, the day would be punctuated by core moments centred either around meals and refreshments or staged performances by artists that required the presence of everyone in the same room, although each person occupied a pre-determined part of the room or table seat according to their status. These were moments of mixed conversation between sexes and different walks of life, which sometimes also involved a little bit of flirting. Between these key moments, there would be phases in which people would either regroup within the same room for chatting, playing
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 153
Figure 7.3 A street in the daimyō residential district of Kasumigaseki. Woodblock print Edo meisho Kasumigaseki by Hiroshige, late Edo period. Source: The Landmarks of Edo in Color Woodblock Prints, National Diet Library.
games, or singing songs together or distribute themselves into different spaces. These series of distributions and redistributions could either take place according to age—with young people playing in the gardens (or in a room if it was raining) and all the adults gathered in a nearby space—or according to class, gender, status, or even personal interests. Men could branch off into another space to smoke and discuss more private issues, while women could likewise exchange information that was of interest to them. At the end of the night, people would often return home, although some might venture into the streets for further drinking and conversations with close friends. Largely unobserved by Whitney and other foreign visitors were the working lives of samurai such as Sakai. This mostly occurred within the samurai quarters (nagaya) and in Sakai’s case at least was mostly completed in the morning, leaving him time to wander the streets or socialise with fellow samurai. His daily routines were thus a mixture of domestic work and public leisure. In contrast, the wives of feudal lords, from Clara Whitney’s hostess, Mrs Katsu, back to Kuroda Tosako over a century earlier, lived almost their whole lives in near seclusion, out of public sight.20 Hall writes to this effect: But the fair damsels of court and hall are no longer visible to vulgar eyes. The Japanese lady of quality lives in the never broken seclusion
154 Bébio Amaro of her own home. She has her garden and ample room for all pastimes within the sacredness of the family enclosure and only on some special holiday or religious occasion does she ever go forth, and then borne in the jealously guarded and closed norimon [palanquin].21 Mrs Katsu and Kuroda’s regular lives fit closely the profile outlined by Hall, except that, by the time Whitney wrote her diary, Tokyo had opened its borders, and Mrs Katsu was now able to travel in the newly introduced rickshaw wherever she wanted, instead of being enclosed inside a palanquin. Another difference might be that, according to Marcia Yonemoto’s study of Kuroda’s movements, in the immediate years after having borne her first children, Kuroda had to move to one of the temporary summer residences of her family right next to the Sumida river due to a fire; since this area (called Honjo) was still fairly underdeveloped and surrounded by vast stretches of vegetation at the time, Kuroda seized the opportunity to take extensive walks around the area with her children.22 This was because she was very fatigued from the constant surveillance placed upon her by the shogunate in her ordinary residence located very close to Edo Castle. But in her later years, she embraced a much more secluded and private lifestyle, interrupted merely by trips that combined visits to her family scattered across Edo with extensive pilgrimages to temples both within and outside the city. She achieved this by leveraging her extensive connections with high-ranking priests to obtain special permissions from the shogunate for temporary exits. Generally speaking, both Mrs Katsu and Kuroda enjoyed family trips for picnics and flower and garden viewing in all the major spots visited by other Edoites; they also attended some religious feasts in major temple precincts and several other special yearly events such as taking a boat and watching the fireworks in the Sumida river, but overall they did not really interact closely with commoners (especially Kuroda).
Low Hills and Bodies of Water: The Hybrid Character of Temple Districts and Festivals Although there were hundreds of religious facilities scattered across Edo, by far the most prestigious and famous sites are those at Atago Hill, Ueno, and Asakusa, coupled with a few other sites that shared similar geographic features. Much like feudal lords, monks expended much effort to secure excellent grounds in isolated, low-lying hills located close to a body of water, which worked together to enhance the sacredness of the site. Starting from the gates of these temples, an entire ecosystem of facilities emerged that functioned as a hybrid zone between the low- and high-class districts. People of all classes could be found here, from poor beggars to noble ladies, although the latter remained mostly out of clear sight, having been given special passage routes by the priests. Bird, who
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 155
Figure 7.4 Street within the Kaminari Gate in Asakusa: photograph, 1911. Source: The Meiji and Taisho Eras in Photographs, National Diet Library.
claimed that the Japanese were probably the most ‘irreligious’ people that she had ever seen, was generally fond of Asakusa (Figure 7.4), visiting it repeatedly and enjoying its vista towards Mt. Fuji. She was also particularly sensitive to the sounds of the area: In the outer temple the noise, confusion, and perpetual motion, are bewildering. Crowds on clattering clogs pass in and out; pigeons, of which hundreds live in the porch, fly over your head, and the whirring of their wings mingles with the tinkling of bells, the beating of drums and gongs, the high-pitched drone of the priests, the low murmur of prayers, the rippling laughter of girls, the harsh voices of men, and the general buzz of a multitude. There is very much that is highly grotesque at first sight. Men squat on the floor selling amulets, rosaries, printed prayers, incense sticks and other wares. Ex votos of all kinds hang on the wall and on the great round pillars. Many of these are rude Japanese pictures.23 Although every day was a festival day in Asakusa, both Hall and Bird mentioned that, beyond the endless crowds enjoying themselves in the outer perimeter of the temples, there were more secluded and quiet
156 Bébio Amaro internal spaces near the main altars, separated from the outside by semitransparent veils or screens, where large numbers of women and young girls could be seen praying; these areas were only made accessible by the priests to the particularly pious for a special price.24 All in all, religious facilities tended to operate much like the businesses located in the vicinity, featuring a variety of products and packages designed to appeal to people’s particular needs or anxieties. Bird mentions the existence of a network of facilities around Edo that accommodated women’s concerns: there were temples for childless wives or for securing the faithfulness of husbands.25 On occasion Kuroda herself had visited temples known for ensuring a safe delivery for her daughters, and she provided a brief glimpse of one such inner temple space: To pray for Mihoko’s safe delivery . . . I went to pay my respects to Kishimojin . . . while I was in front of Kishimojin, bowing and worshipping, the chief priest of the temple along with a multitude of monks came out, chanting mantras in unison; thinking it was such a graceful thing, I discreetly listened . . . this being a day with tranquil, fine weather, I approached the abbot’s dwelling to rest my tired legs, and I let the people there eat some things from my lunch box and a small container pipe.26 Contiguous to the temple were pleasure gardens and numerous tea houses of all sorts: in these locations there were many groups of people relaxing, drinking, or eating light meals. One could also see numerous shows and spectacles patronised by pilgrims: wax figures; sumo wrestling matches with half-naked boys; trained animal performances; or a theatre with narrated acrobatic performances.27 Atago Hill was another major pilgrimage spot. It was often the very first place that foreign and Japanese visitors alike were told to visit within Edo for the sake of grasping the city’s extent. Nearly all the diarists drawn upon in this chapter went there, and reactions could differ considerably. Hall and Satow both appreciated the view from the temple at Atago, but the sight of the beautiful tea girls was far more lasting in their minds, especially their low bows and ‘persuasive beckonings of the hand’. Sakai was so impressed with the view of Edo that he thought no words or brush could suffice to describe the sheer extent of the city, whereas Bird and Mitford found the same view to be fairly monotonous and unimpressive, lacking in grandiosity.28 Saitō, Shibata, and Sakai visited several temples and shrines in the city, but there is nothing in the texts to suggest that they were particularly devoted, certainly not to the degree of Kuroda. By and large, their trips to temples are quick, uneventful, and related to the visit of other nearby sites (a possible exception may be Saitō’s yearly visits to the temple where his family is buried). The ‘irreligiosity’ of Japanese
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 157 pilgrims stated by Bird seems to fully apply, since religion, entertainment, and commerce were profoundly interlinked.
Borders of Violence: The Rowdy Spaces of Liminal Towns For most foreigners and Japanese alike, their first experience of Edo involved passing through one of the border towns attached to a major access route, occupied by various sorts of brothels, tea houses, gambling places, and inns. Four major post stations are known: Shinagawa; Shinjuku; Itabashi; and Senjū. The famous brothel district of Yoshiwara, while not being an outpost town, was likewise located at the city’s northeast periphery. Out of the four post stations, Shinagawa (Figure 7.5) was unquestionably the most frequented and the most notorious for violence, due to its privileged position along the Tōkaidō. Curiously, none of the Japanese diaries mention any visits to Shinagawa, but all the foreigners decry it as a particularly disreputable place. Mitford, for instance, calls it a rowdy suburb of Edo, a place where every house was a den of infamy where . . . the drunken retainers of Daimyo met and fought out their
Figure 7.5 Shinagawa at sunrise. Woodblock print Tokaido gojusantsugi Shinagawa hinode by Hiroshige, late Edo period. Source: The Landmarks of Edo in Color Woodblock Prints, National Diet Library.
158 Bébio Amaro feuds . . . a horrible suburb which we had to pass through every time we went to or from Edo, never venturing there after dark without the greatest precaution.29 A typical day in the life of Shinagawa can be roughly reconstructed from various descriptions provided by Hall and Mitford.30 They identified it as the halting place for numerous travellers just before entering the city and a pleasure resort for large parties from Edo. As overnight travellers got up to get on the road again, ‘it was not an uncommon thing in the early morning to see a dead body hacked to pieces thrown out before a tea house door’.31 At the same early time of day, Hall could see that several contiguous inns had been taken up by a grand traveller and his large retinue. At the entrances of the inns, elaborately finished norimons [palanquins] were awaiting their inmates at the doors, servants were busy putting the baggage in packs and securing it to the horses’ backs. The armed attendants were lounging about the open doors smoking their morning pipe waiting for the train to move on.32 Another class of travellers could be seen leaving some of the buildings, namely young lads belonging to fine families. While all this was taking place, Hall saw beggars sitting on mats under the trees that bordered the few open spaces adjacent to that road. Some of them who had an incurable disease were carried by their companions and frequently bothered the foreigners who passed by, asking for money. Not far away, there was an execution ground where ‘standing on a board with features ghastly in death we saw the head of a recently decapitated criminal’.33 Around 8 a.m. or so, there were not many travellers on the road of Shinagawa: most of them had left earlier in the morning, leaving the inns quiet and deserted. Hall noted on one occasion that a group of four local women passed by: who with their peculiar broad hats and guitar in hand, were singing for alms from house to house . . . in their movements they showed an uncommon grace and ease, while on their expressive faces was a half sad expression, as if they felt how unjust their fate, to be condemned, with all their charms, to the life of strolling beggars.34 This statement represents one of the many occasions where Hall lamented the low social standing of most Japanese women. In the river shortly after Shinagawa, which separates Edo from the town of Kanagawa, he witnessed ‘two little beggar girls eight or ten years old completely nude asking alms of every passer by’.35 By the afternoon,
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 159 the samurai class who lead an indolent, vicious life frequent the Sinagawa [sic] inns to an extent that renders them unsafe for foreigners. They come for a carouse and bring their mistresses with them or find them in the large joroyas [brothels] of Sinagawa and would at such times be reckless of what they did.36 Bayard Taylor adds that ‘the suburb of Shinagawa is abandoned by the police during the greater part of the night. Even the women sally out upon the Tōkaidō, and assail the belated travellers, in order to force them into the houses where they serve’.37 The beggars witnessed by Hall (including the singing women and the naked children) were very likely members of the low-caste communities known as eta or hinin. These communities were allowed to live in secluded areas behind major temples such as Asakusa or in the narrow back alleys of some commoner streets, living in small huts squashed between the nagaya and the canals as far away from the public eye as possible, as a result of their ‘impure’ activities, which resulted in the shedding of blood and the need to discharge such polluted contents directly into the river. As a compensation for cutting and preparing leather hides or carrying out executions of criminals and helping to maintain public order, the members of these communities were uniquely authorised to beg in certain areas of the city.38 Despite being the target of strong social discrimination, Hall visited one such community in Kanagawa right outside Edo and found that for the most part they were not as poor and destitute as he had assumed and that they benefitted to some extent from the lack of competition. In fact, Hall went as far as suspecting that, for many, begging was more of a profession than a necessity.39
Aquatic Streets: Nomadic and Transient Spaces for Work and Pleasure For Edo’s inhabitants, the canals were just as much streets as the actual streets earlier described in this text. Hall’s first-ever glimpse of Edo Bay, around 10 a.m. on 1 November 1860, was not particularly impressive: the bay was still and almost lifeless, hardly bustling with crafts; a few mastjunks and a small number of fishing boats could be seen here and there; low hills were covered with temples; and picturesque spots along the sea were occupied by teahouses or princely residences. But as he returned to the Sumida River in the afternoon, it was bustling with activity: It is the great artery of the city. Boats of various sizes are plying up and down distributing to the warehouses merchandise brought from the junks in the harbour or carrying out exports to other points. More numerous were the passenger and pleasure boats. . . . In these
160 Bébio Amaro boats pleasure parties were numerously seen on the river enjoying their pipes, their meals. . . . The bridge above us was filled as we embarked . . . the banks were lined with dwelling houses and stores interrupted here and there by a tea house from whose balconies overhanging the river came the sounds of noisy mirth. Open as the balconies were to the river we could see the groups of singing girls making merry for their lords who sat around the dishes that contained their feast. All stopped to stare at us and the girls waved their hands and shouted Japanese welcomes.40 The wealthy Charles Longfellow also quickly became an aficionado of the ‘floating world’ offered by the landscape of Edo and bragged that ‘I have seen more of Yedo and Yedo’s pleasant side than some fellows who have been out here several years’.41 He spoke quite fondly of his experiences in teahouse gardens and pleasure boats: tea gardens where the ‘young Japan’ delight to spend the day lazing off on cool straw mats in loose dressing gowns, smoking, singing, reading aloud to each other, and listening to the singing girls they often bring with them. Our evenings have been spent drifting about on the river . . . before getting into the boat, we pulled our shoes off so as not to dirty the beautiful mats with which the centre of the boat was spread, under a roof . . . we glided along among the other boats in the bright moon light, with the cool evening breeze refreshing us, the shores lit up from the rows of lanterns hung up from the teahouses, the sound of many ‘shamisens’ and snatches of song and laughter that came floating over the water from the hundreds of boats gliding about looking like fire flies with their paper lanterns . . . was charming.42 Longfellow then gave a somewhat long narration of one of his many visits to a teahouse, his experience being just as flirtatious as that of Hall, both of whom emphasised the tea girls’ delicate, attentive, and deferential gestures during service: We landed at one of the teahouses near the second bridge and were ushered upstairs to a large corner room and the animated scene upon it. Here our friends took off their swords and clothes and put on loose dressing gowns to be more at their ease. . . . And then was heard a great tittering and laughing, and in trotted twenty-five singing girls . . . they knelt in front of us while we ate, helping us in the most graceful way. . . . Then a girl would present you with a tiny tea cup and fill it with sake . . . after which if you like the girl and want to be gallant, you dip your cup of cold water to clean it and hand it back to her. When she touches it to her forehead with a low bow, you fill it for her, and she drinks.43
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 161 While men in general had plenty of fun frequenting teahouses and teasing tea girls at any time, Whitney was not very fond of the crowded atmosphere of riverside teahouses during major festivals, and it is unlikely that she would have participated in the flirtatious rituals described by Hall and Longfellow. She went to a tea house—where she and her friends were regulars—overlooking Ryōgoku Bridge (probably the most important bridge passing over the Sumida), from which she could view the summer fireworks display, namely the famous ‘opening of the Sumida River’ festival. It was nevertheless difficult for her to enjoy herself: they welcomed us heartily and conducted us upstairs where there were seated several people, the men half-naked. I don’t like to see those nude men. Of course, they have a loin cloth but I hate to see their skin; the women look disgusting and the men look savage. I was rather frightened when they gave us seats near these men who were laughing, talking, and drinking saké by turns.44 Whitney was disapproving of the extent to which people relaxed by wearing looser and more revealing clothes, but in any case festive events like this one provided escape-valves where people often indulged in excesses beyond what was normal. Hall noticed that, during religious festival processions, commoners were allowed to mock and dress like the samurai and daimyō, using the event as a pressure valve to offload their grievances.45 While Bird visited plenty of tea houses in her trips across Japan, she remained completely silent on anything related with flirting, except that she asked her translator to avoid any inns or teahouses of ‘disreputable character’ along the way, even though from the outside they looked far cleaner and better-kept than the ordinary shabby, flea-ridden places she often had to endure.46 Teahouses were also places where gossip of all sorts—both true and intentionally false—could be spread, and Hall himself claimed to exchange gossip about the goings-on in Yokohama and Edo with tea girls.47 The male diaries of Saitō, Sakai, and Shibata certainly mention trips to teahouses, but nothing whatsoever is said as to what happens there, other than them getting drunk. Since teahouses and pleasure boats could be innocently used by partying families as much as by individuals who wished to flirt or engage in sexual adventures, it is to be expected that the experiences of foreign women would somewhat diverge from those of men. Having previously seen how temples allowed for a mixing of different social classes, it is clear that major bridges such as Nihonbashi, Ryōgoku, and Azuma played a very similar role (Figure 7.6). It was often next to such bridges that people of all sorts entered and exited passenger boats. This made them perfect magnets for all sorts of performers and itinerant sellers to engage in their activities. Hall described the crowded scene in
162 Bébio Amaro
Figure 7.6 Ryōgoku Bridge during the summer fireworks festival at night. Woodblock print Santo suzumi no zu Toto Ryogoku-bashi natsugeshiki by Gountei Sadahide, 1859. Source: The Landmarks of Edo in Color Woodblock Prints, National Diet Library.
the south part of the Ryōgoku Bridge serving as the entrance to the lowdensity suburbs of Honjo: It was like a country fair where are all sorts of devices to gather the idle pennies of passers by. There were refreshment booths in front of one of which was a tempting display of game, a wild deer lay on a board and near him were braces of pheasants and other small game and a large wing bat, large as a barn door fowl! There were sing-song booths, singing girls, gambling sheds, show boxes, sleight-of-hand performers, tumblers, harlequins, and importunate beggars pertinaciously plied their calling.48 In this manner, one can see how bridges functioned as both chokepoints— where people coming from different directions were forced to funnel— and connection nodes where people could take palanquins, rickshaws, and boats to various places, thus making them highly attractive for professions that relied on inconsistent and precarious sources of income. Furthermore, the strong spatial connectivity between sites of religion, commerce, and entertainment generated a constant circulation of people and ideas, encouraging innovative forms of spatial appropriation by street performers and sellers, in a city that was as much overbearing through its imposition of strict laws and surveillance as it was hedonistic. By allowing for a temporary escape from the rigid social control imposed by the Tokugawa shogunate, river streets, bridges, and the wide-open
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 163 bay facilitated not just daily work but periods of relaxation and even transgression.
Conclusions While the recent ‘spatial turn’ stands as an important development in historical studies, it is often the cultural and discursive dimension of space that tends to be focused on. This chapter has sought to take into consideration the materiality of space—water, earth, vegetation, objects, light and shadow, and so forth—and especially its morphology. This includes aspects such as topography, architectural design, sensitivity to the landscape, geographical orientation and vistas, urban density and infrastructure, access to water, or positions of centrality, periphery, and liminality, among many others that could be mentioned. Looking at the sum of experiences narrated by the various diarists presented in this text, it is hard to overstate the degree to which hierarchical relations influenced Japanese society in the early modern period. This factor—labelled here as ‘hierarchical space’—is felt even in the very urban fabric of Edo/Tokyo. It explains to some extent the positioning of sites for communities of low castes, sex workers, troublemakers, commoners, farmers, warriors, and feudal lords; it also relates to the management of spatial relations and mutual communication between people within a single residential building. This can be seen in the ways that various sorts of people—from tea girls to feudal lords—use spaces and distances to enact certain gestures and thus to culturally convey sentiments of deference, appreciation, or flirtation. Spaces contain implicit cultural codes of behaviour that allow one to enact their identity, whether that implies sitting at the highest position of a lavish Japanese guest room or sitting on a poor mat under a tree in Shinagawa in order to undertake the act of begging. While this chapter is too brief to give a complete overview of what happens in a city as large as Edo, some spatial patterns can be gleaned by overlaying multiple sources. What one chronicler misses might get captured in the pen of another. Unfortunately, Japanese diaries and similar sorts of ‘ego’ documents are often quite sparse in their description of daily spatial practices, since they take the quotidian for granted, and they are generally more valuable for studies of mobility and social interactions. But when used to complement the descriptions found in the diaries of foreign visitors, the diversity of perspectives at hand provides a fuller picture of what daily life looked like in the past, even if a full reconstruction will always remain out of reach. On the other hand, spaces tend to become ‘kaleidoscopic’ or multifaceted as we overlay layers upon layers of micro-histories on top of them, and they therefore become more challenging to make sense of. The approach adopted in this chapter to address this problem was to identify concordant and discordant experiences among visitors to
164 Bébio Amaro the various sites of Edo and elaborate a rough typology of zones—with associated spatial practices—that reveal overarching geographic patterns transcending the narrow timeframes of micro-histories. But, as Longfellow himself realised in December 1871, nothing can truly remain the same, as Edo became Tokyo: I can’t leave the nice old place, and in a year or two it will be all spoilt. They are beginning to imitate Europeans in dress and manners and remind one of monkeys. There are three small Japanese restaurants run on European principles in Yedo now, a dozen barber shops with striped poles, a few boot blacks, etc. All these are innovations since my arrival in the country.49
Acknowledgements This work was supported by an NWO grant for the research project ‘The Freedom of the Streets. Gender and Urban Space in Europe and Asia (1600–1850)’ (276–69–007), led by Dr. Danielle van den Heuvel. In addition, I would like to thank Ran Aoki for her kind assistance in translating and explaining some of the more challenging textual passages from Kuroda Tosako’s diary.
Notes 1. Throughout this paper, all full names of Japanese individuals were written according to Japanese custom, that is, with the family name preceding the first name. In reality, Japanese women did not have family names but merely a first name; however, as is common in Japanese scholarship, the family name of the husband has been included for added clarity and to make identification easier when two women happen to share the same first name. 2. See the 1609 description of Edo by the Spaniard Rodrigo de Vivero in Emilio Sola, ‘Rodrigo de Vivero en la Corte de los Tokugawa’, Archivo de la Frontera (March 2003): 11–12. 3. Matsunosuke Nishiyama, Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, trans. Gerald Groemer (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), 1–22; William E. Deal, Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47, 67–68. 4. Fred Notehelfer, ed., Japan through American Eyes: The Journal of Francis Hall, 1859–1866 (Boulder, CO and Oxford: Westview Press, 2001), henceforth referred to as Journal of Francis Hall; Ernest Satow, A Diplomat in Japan (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1921); Ian Ruxton, ‘Sir Ernest Satow in Japan, 1862–69: Comparing his Diary (‘Journal’) and his Memoir titled A Diplomat in Japan’, IAJS Journal 1 (2015): 23–32; Hugh Cortazzi, ed., Mitford’s Japan: Memories and Recollections, 1866–1906, Revised Edition (Great Britain: Japan Library, 2002); Hugh Cortazzi, ed., Victorians in Japan: In and Around the Treaty Ports (Great Britain: Bloomsbury Academic Collections, 2012); Christine Laidlaw, ed., Charles Appleton Longfellow: Twenty Months in Japan, 1871–1873 (Cambridge, MA: Friends of the Longfellow House, 1998), henceforth referred to as Longfellow’s Diary.
Kaleidoscopic Spaces 165 5. Henry Faulds, Nine Years in Nipon: Sketches of Japanese Life and Manners (Boston: Cupples & Hurd, 1888); M. William Steele and Tamiko Ichimata, eds., Clara’s Diary: An American Girl in Meiji Japan (Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1979); Isabella Bird, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan: An Account of Travels in the Interior including Visits to the Aborigines of Yezo and the Shrines of Nikkô and Isé, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1881). 6. Bird, Unbeaten Tracks, 1:7. 7. Keiko Shiba, ed., ‘Ishihara-ki’ ‘Koto no hagusa’: daimyō fujin no nikki, Edoki Onna Shiryō, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Katsura Bunko, 2008), henceforth referred to as Diary of Tosako; Marcia Yonemoto, ‘Outside the Inner Quarters: Sociability, Mobility and Narration in Early Edo-Period Women’s Diaries’, Japan Forum 21, no. 3 (2010): 389–401; Historiographical Institute of Tokyo, ed., Dai nihon ko-kiroku: saitō gesshin nikki, 10 vols. (Tokyo: Iwanami Publishing, 1997–2016); Keiichi Tanaka, ed., Shibata Shūzō nikki, 2 vols. (Ogi, Sado: Ogi-machi chōshi kankō iinkai, 1971); Takeshi Moriyama, ‘Study in Edo: Shibata Shūzō (1820–59) and Student Life in Late-Tokugawa Japan’, East Asian History 40 (2016): 27–50; Edo-Tokyo Museum, ed., Sakai Hanjirō nikki: ei’in to honkoku (Tokyo: Edo-Tokyo Museum, 2010), henceforth referred to as Diary of Hanjirō. 8. Edo-Tokyo Museum, Diary of Hanjirō, 86–87. 9. William Coaldrake, ‘Edo Architecture and Tokugawa Law’, Monumenta Nipponica 36, no. 3 (Autumn 1981): 235–84; André Sorensen. The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty First Century (London and New York: Routledge, 2005). 10. The system of alternate attendance required the daimyō in charge of the various provinces of Japan to spend one full year with their large retinue of servants and samurai in Edo, then another year in their respective provinces, while their wives and children would remain behind in Edo as hostages. This system was intended to deplete the financial resources of feudal lords by concentrating them in Edo and thus minimise the risk of rebellions. 11. Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan, 11–44. 12. Faulds, Nine Years, 46. 13. For detailed explanations and illustrations of all the Japanese-style buildings and urban streets mentioned in this text, see Kiyoshi Hirai, Bilingual: The Japanese House Then and Now, 2nd ed. (Tokyo: Ichigaya Publishing, 1999). 14. Faulds, Nine Years, 46–51. 15. Ibid., 55. 16. Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 272–73. 17. Faulds, Nine Years, 71. 18. Laidlaw, Longfellow’s Diary, 28. 19. Edo-Tokyo Museum, Diary of Hanjirō, 71–72. Stores and itinerant merchants in Edo would often serve a diverse range of needs. For example, a store near the compound where Hanjirō regularly purchased ingredients for cooking such as miso paste and pickles would also wash his clothes. It should be mentioned that the American Legation’s quarters were designed according to the same hierarchical principles as daimyō residences; see Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 434. 20. Steele and Ichimata, Clara’s Diary, 56, 64–65, 79; Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 453. 21. Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 263–64. 22. Yonemoto, ‘Outside the Inner Quarters’, 395. 23. Bird, Unbeaten Tracks, 1: 24–25 and 2: 178, 198. 24. Ibid., 1: 25; Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 261. 25. Bird, Unbeaten Tracks, 2: 178–80.
166 Bébio Amaro 26. Shiba, Diary of Tosako, 250–51. Translated by the author with the assistance of Ran Aoki. 27. Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 261–62, 431. 28. Ibid., 261–63; Bird, Unbeaten Tracks, 2: 169; Steele and Ichimata, Clara’s Diary, 52; Satow, A Diplomat in Japan, 66–67; Edo-Tokyo Museum, Diary of Hanjirō, 59; Cortazzi, Victorians in Japan, 112. 29. Cortazzi, Mitford’s Japan, 35. 30. Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 272–74, 425–26, 435. 31. Cortazzi, Mitford’s Japan, 35. 32. Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 273. 33. Ibid., 273. 34. Ibid., 426. 35. Ibid., 425. 36. Ibid., 273. 37. Bayard Taylor, Japan in Our Day, Compiled and Arranged by Bayard Taylor, Revised by William Elliot Griffis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1892), 99. 38. For more details on the history of these low-caste communities, see Gerald Groemer, ‘The Creation of the Edo Outcaste Order’, The Journal of Japanese Studies 27, no. 2 (2001): 263–93; also cf. Hideo Hattori, Kawara no mono—Hinin—Hideyoshi (Japan: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 2012). 39. Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 45–46. 40. Ibid., 257. 41. Laidlaw, Longfellow’s Diary, 28. 42. Ibid., 28, 30. 43. Ibid., 30. 44. Steele and Ichimata, Clara’s Diary, 93. 45. Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 44. 46. Bird, Unbeaten Tracks, 1: 44. 47. Notehelfer, Journal of Francis Hall, 274. 48. Ibid., 269. 49. Laidlaw, Longfellow’s Diary, 113.
Part III
Home and Away
8 Around and About The Daily Routines of a Councilman in Early Nineteenth-Century Sweden Gudrun Andersson
Stockholm, January 1808 ‘This was the most enjoyable afternoon I’ve ever had’. Such were the words of the Arboga councilman and merchant Anders Adolph Kihlberg (born in 1755), ending his diary notes for 24 January in 1808. Considering his otherwise brief and concise way of writing about his activities, this afternoon really stands out as something remarkable.1 The day had been spent in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. It was a special day for the royal family: the birthday of the late Gustav III, the former king and the founder of Gustavian absolutism. To honour his memory, the Stockholm burghers had erected an impressive statue of the king. It was unveiled on this very day, at Skeppsbron, next to the royal palace. Accordingly, this was a day of festivities and celebrations— a pleasant change for a nation on the verge of war.2 Making the most of his day, Kihlberg had a tight schedule. It started early: at 7 a.m., he had coffee at a friend’s house, and two hours later he went on a guided tour at the ‘bourse’, where preparations for the evening’s ball and supper were being made. Although he had not been invited, he appreciated the arrangements. At 11 o’clock he watched the town corporation’s (the magistrate in Swedish) procession from the city hall to the palace, and then—at last—the statue was unveiled. For another hour and a half, he enjoyed the parade and salutes and the procession back to the city hall. Luncheon at another friend’s house followed, including two large bowls of Swedish punch. So entertaining was the visit that he stayed there until after 9 p.m. By way of his writing, Kihlberg joins the large group of individuals writing diaries during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an activity often associated with the societal elite or celebrities of their time. The diaries of Count Axel von Fersen the younger and Queen Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta are but two examples from late eighteenth-century Sweden.3 However, shifting focus from the upper elite to the majority of the population deepens our knowledge of a more common everyday life, and the chances of finding such material are good. In fact, Brodie Waddell
170 Gudrun Andersson speaks of ‘innumerable’ writers from the middling or lower social strata, and Karen Harvey stresses the connection between autobiographical writing and the male middle class.4 This shift of focus also brings to light different ways of writing. Instead of writing about their personal thoughts and feelings, the manuscripts left by the literate majority can be characterised as ‘personal chronicles’ or commonplace books. Theirs was social rather than personal writing, aimed at being used in housekeeping, business and family records.5 The writings of Kihlberg fit perfectly with this characterisation. Every day, over a period of almost thirteen years, from 1808 until his death in 1820, he made a short note. All in all, the diary comprises c.420 pages in folio. The entries are brief, not allowing much space for personal reflections (see Figure 8.1). After reporting on the weather of the day, he describes his routines according to activity, location, time and company. His ‘personal chronicles’ also include a diversity of transcribed recipes, household remedies, anecdotes and verses, covering another 90 pages. Chronicles like these could also be found at bookstalls, and they were often advertised in the daily press.6 A similar Swedish example is the diary of the bookkeeper and artist Carl Henric Robsahm. Again, the weather is
Figure 8.1 The diary of Kihlberg, the end of March and the beginning of April 1808. Source: Merit Åhs Janbrink.
Around and About 171 a daily concern, followed by the everyday lives of Robsahm and his family. His ‘chronicles’ also included lists of the birthdays and name days of his children, and records of his journeys to Stockholm.7 Although there are only a few examples of surviving Swedish diaries or autobiographies, they confirm the findings of, among others, Karen Harvey and Brodie Waddell regarding the complexity of male ego-documents. For a modern reader, diaries like these appear rather monotonous, but the impersonal way of writing is actually an advantage when studying daily life. In a more eventful diary, the daily routines would probably be overshadowed by other events or not mentioned at all. Furthermore, the things that were put down in the text must have been important—either as being systematically noted, in Kihlberg’s case: mobility and social gatherings with food and drinks—or as providing a break from the daily routines, like the afternoon in Stockholm.8 Routines were also created by the actual writing process. Kihlberg, Robsahm and others spent time every day summarising their activities. The act of keeping records was familiar to many of them and was probably not seen as an effort. Diaries such as these facilitate an analysis of the everyday life and of writing a history from below. What is so special about Kilhberg—or Robsahm—is that they were ordinary men. When describing Robsahm, Britt Liljewall emphasises that there is nothing exciting about him: he did not belong to the most powerful families; he was not known outside his own circle of contacts; his actions did not attract official attention.9 Much the same is true of Kihlberg. What, then, did he do all day? The question is as simple as it is complex, and, as pointed out by Hannah Greig and Amanda Vickery, answering such a ‘mundane query’ is never easy.10 However, it is a rewarding task. The entries and reflections made by Kihlberg offer insight into the everyday life of an early modern urban household, engaged in trade as well as local politics. In a broader perspective, they also offer insight into early modern mentality as well as the lifestyle and identity of a middling family, including the political life exercised beyond the capital (Stockholm) and on gender relations in the making of the rising middle class. The chapter concentrates on the early years of the diary when he had a wellestablished position professionally as well as personally. It is structured according to his whereabouts and is divided into three parts. ‘Around and About’ analyses his journeys to Stockholm and other closer destinations, where he spent considerable time; ‘At home—and About’ analyses the everyday life in his hometown Arboga and ‘At home—Within the Household’ focuses on the daily management of the household and family relations. These different settings required different kinds of routines when it came to planning and scheduling, frequency and time cycles and with whom to engage and interact. They also highlight the amount of mobility that was embedded in his daily life.
172 Gudrun Andersson
Around and About From his diary, it soon becomes clear that Kihlberg travelled quite a lot. He methodically made notations on his destination and the time for departure and arrival. The journeys were concentrated on Mälardalen, that is the provinces along the shores of lake Mälaren (Figure 8.2). This was the most prosperous and flourishing part of Sweden, with several important towns all along the shoreline.11 Stockholm is situated to the east, where the lake flows out into the Baltic sea, and Arboga is located at the other end, far to the west. Its location was perfect. Thanks to the depth of the Arboga River, vessels could anchor in Arboga, and for a long period the town was an important hub in the trade between Stockholm and the nearby ironworks in Bergslagen. Stockholm was one of the places he regularly frequented. Travelling to Stockholm was necessary for those engaged in local politics because, although the self-government of the town corporations was far-reaching, there were always matters that needed higher, even royal, approval. On behalf of the Arboga corporation, Kihlberg was appointed to the honoured task of bringing the issue before the king. In 1808 he went to Stockholm four times, in January, March, September/October and December. It was quite an enterprise to get there; the journey that today would take one hour by car took two to three days and included one
Figure 8.2 Map of lake Mälaren 1717. Lantmäteriets historiska kartarkiv. Source: Lantmäteriet, Gävle.
Around and About 173 or two overnight stays along the way. He travelled by land, not using the sea route (see Figure 8.3a): early in the morning of 14 January he left Arboga, travelled by way of Köping to Västerås, where he spent the night; at 2 p.m. the following day he left for Enköping, arriving in the middle of the night at ‘Gran’, where he had to wait several hours for new horses; at midday of 16 January, he finally arrived at Stockholm. This journey included a short detour to Mariefred and Gripsholm royal castle. He chose the same route back to Arboga, now with a detour to Virsbo, and returned to his family in the evening of 1 February.12 The other three Stockholm journeys followed more or less the same pattern. In March and December, he travelled along the southern shoreline of Mälaren, staying the night in Eksåg and, in March, also in Mariefred, and he returned along the northern shoreline (see Figure 8.3b, 8.3d). The September journey was undertaken along the southern shoreline in both directions (see Figure 8.3c).13 His choice of route (south/north/both) cannot be explained by the time of year, where one way would be better equipped for, say, wintry conditions on the roads. Neither was the difference in time decisive, since they do not differ that much. Instead, the complexity of the journeys must be taken into consideration. It was not only—or even primarily— a matter of transport but an opportunity to carry out and accomplish a variety of things along the way. Kihlberg seldom travelled alone, and his journeys were thus occasions to meet and do business with friends and colleagues. For instance, the January trip to Stockholm was all about the forthcoming election of a new mayor in Arboga. Before he left Arboga, he had breakfast with two friends, also councilmen, Westén and Papé. The three of them formed the town corporation deputation concerning the ‘mayor business’. After breakfast they travelled together to Västerås, where they met with the officer of the law, Almgren, and the royal secretary, Hjort, conducting a long ‘conference’ about the mayoral election. Secretary Hjort was the candidate of the corporation for the position, and he was obviously closely involved in the planning. Kihlberg spent the evening with Hjort, going to the theatre and having dinner.14 Already on the first day of the journey, the importance of socialising when doing politics stands out.15 Mayoral business continued the next day, when Kilhberg, according to his plans, visited the county governor Count Ulrik Gustaf De La Gardie and had breakfast with the mayor of Västerås, Hellman. Both De La Gardie and Hellman were high-ranking royal officials, and securing their support seems to have been part of the plan. Kihlberg described the response of the Count as ‘favourable’. After another, more formal meeting with Hjort, he stopped for dinner with a friend in Enköping and continued to Gran in terrible weather.16 Once in Stockholm, he frequently met and associated with Hjort.17 The detour to Mariefred and Gripsholm was also part of the plan. He went there together with Papé, and they called
Figure 8.3 Kihlberg’s routes to Stockholm: from top to bottom (a) January, (b) March, (c) September and (d) December 1808. Source: Graphic Services, Uppsala University.
Around and About 175
Figure 8.3 (Continued)
on the state secretary for foreign affairs, Baron Wetterstedt. Their plan worked out well, and they were allowed a short audience with the king, Gustav IV Adolph, who was rather sympathetic to their cause. In the evening, Kihlberg witnessed the royal public dinner, after which he was invited to a drinking party by the royal cupbearer. Before he went to bed, at midnight, he befriended the Court Footman (‘taffeltäckare’). Back in Stockholm, he entertained himself in different ways, enjoying the festivities described earlier. Upon his departure from Stockholm, he said goodbye to Hjort and several friends. On his way back home, he again paid visits to high-ranking officials in Västerås: President Almgren, Mayor Hellman and the cathedral dean, Eric Waller.18 During the journey, he also met another three friends, two of whom shared his accommodation for the night at an inn.19 Sharing sleeping space was not uncommon and would probably be of economic as well as social value. Obviously, Kihlberg was busy during his Stockholm journeys, not only in Stockholm but also on his way to and from the capital. His tight schedule of who to meet and what to do presupposes a large amount of planning and organisation. It comes as no surprise that he stayed quite a while in Stockholm, trying to get as much as possible done. The shortest journey lasted a week and a half (March), the January trip two weeks and a half and the longest almost four weeks (September/October). Judging from the number of people mentioned in the diary, Kihlberg had a large circle of contacts scattered around Mälardalen. Most of them were his social equals, involved in local politics and commerce, and it is often impossible to make a distinction between formal and informal relations. Being part of this network must have been an important asset when
176 Gudrun Andersson exercising his offices, not least concerning the exchange of information. It might have created an identity as a ‘councilman’s person’—as taking part of a broader process in which work was central in forming a masculine identity.20 That could explain how Kilhberg could interact with higher officials apparently without difficulty. When talking about the occupational identity of early modern men, it is important to keep an open mind to how complex such an identity could be. Apart from doing business, whether as a merchant or councilman, the Stockholm journeys allowed him to bring back news of different kinds to his Arboga surroundings. One exclusive kind of information was anything concerning the royal family. Kihlberg met the king in person twice that year, first at Gripsholm castle, second and very briefly in December at the Royal Palace in Stockholm. The King asked about his health, ‘how I was’, how things were in Arboga and sent his regards.21 Although this was not much of a conversation, an actual meeting with the King was a rare privilege. Kihlberg’s efforts to entertain and befriend people connected to the court underline the attraction of royalty. Public entertainments were another attraction. Kihlberg went to the theatre, dined at various establishments and enjoyed ceremonies of different kinds, as well as sightseeing. He recorded several buildings, locations and more particular attractions, including a ‘large Russian ship’ anchored in the harbour.22 The first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a boom (in the Nordic countries) in entertainment and leisure activities, such as theatres, promenades, assembly rooms, cafés and restaurants.23 As elsewhere, this was an urban phenomenon, and it came to serve as a central arena for the rising middle class. For Kihlberg and his friends and colleagues, it provided established settings where they could (and were expected to) socialise and where councilman networks were established and enforced. Dag Lindström characterises this as a ‘new urban polite leisure culture’, and I would like to emphasise the connection between the new phenomenon and a ‘new’ social group.24 In their struggle for societal power, the rising middle class needed to create an exclusive identity in which polite leisure culture was one ingredient. This would fit with what Woodruff Smith has labelled the culture of respectability: that is the construction of a bourgeois identity built around the framework of respectability.25 Kihlberg embraced leisure culture but seems to have been more indifferent to another hallmark of the respectability—consumption. He spent almost no time on shopping, although the selection of goods must have been overwhelming compared to his hometown. During his lengthy visit in September/October he bought shoes and fabric for a tail coat and trousers and shipped a piano and a parrot to Arboga.26 When his oldest daughter married in 1810, the wedding dress was ordered from Stockholm.27 Yet he never wrote about or commented on fashion or what the people he met were wearing. It is possible, of course, that this kind of news might have been asked for when he
Around and About 177 returned home. His frequent journeys probably enhanced his local and maybe regional social status considerably and made him something of a Stockholm authority. Not all destinations recorded in Kihlberg’s diary were so far distant. He regularly went to places in the vicinity of Arboga, including Köping, Kungsör, Örebro, Fellingsbro, the ironworks of Jäder and Strömsholm royal castle.28 These journeys were related to his own livelihood and to specific arrangements in connection with his responsibility for the town’s military storehouses, the two interests often being combined in the same journey. A demanding task for the town corporation was to accommodate large numbers of soldiers due to troop movements during the ‘Finnish war’ as well as dealing with Russian prisoners of war. The relation between the town dwellers and the soldiers could be tense, and Kihlberg noted some troubles between these two groups a couple of times.29 As with the Stockholm journeys, he socialised with numerous business partners and friends, which again required planning in advance. He also seized the opportunity to do some sightseeing, such as Strömsholm’s castle, the garden and the iron works at Jädersbruk and the garden and its promenades at Utnäs, close to Strömsholm. Occasionally, he made remarks that he had enjoyed visits to Hällby and Strömsholm and had spotted a beautiful French Baroness ‘Bellmont’ in Glanshammar.30 When he accompanied one of his daughters to drink the waters at Sätrabrunn, they met his ‘Excellency Count [af] Ugglas’ and had the honour to dine with him in the evening.31 He even showed a glimpse of economic consideration, when he remarked that his day at Strömsholm castle had been enjoyable ‘and did not cost me anything’.32 All in all, Kihlberg spent considerable time away from home. From the diary alone, it is hard to find recurrent routines for his journeys, other than that they were rather frequent. They must have required quite a large amount of planning, but these preparations are not mentioned in the diary. Nor did he record information on the actual journey, apart from occasional complaints about bad road conditions. Whether he was in Stockholm or closer to Arboga, he had a tight schedule that was focused on tasks connected to town corporation business. As a consequence, his routines ‘around and about’ revolved around other men. The complexity of what was expected from a councilman stands out and includes devising plans, calling on authorities, dealing with logistics of different kinds, and socialising in general and within his network in particular. Nonetheless, most of his everyday life was staged in Arboga.
At Home—and About Kihlberg’s work as a councilman dominated his Arboga life as well. Time was spent at the town hall, taking part in different proceedings and doing more administrative work. Writing letters and minutes and preparing documents of different kinds seem to have made for a heavy workload.
178 Gudrun Andersson When the mayor was out of town, he now and again was responsible for the correspondence of the Magistracy.33 Nonetheless, it is surprising how little time Kihlberg spent in the town hall. Since he usually noted his whereabouts, there is no reason to believe that he would not have mentioned working in the town hall. A similar observation—regardless of other points of comparisons—has been made by Hannah Greig and Amanda Vickery in their study of eighteenth-century politicians in London; ‘it is striking how little time men actually spent in Parliament’.34 Instead, the important part of fulfilling his duties and commitments as a councilman (and merchant) was to interact with people, again in line with the results for London politicians.35 In this respect, his daily life in Arboga was not that different from that during his journeys to other places. He was on the move more or less all day, visiting taverns and establishments as well as friends, usually in groups of three to five persons. Evenings often ended at the gaming table, playing cards or board games. Most of the people mentioned in his diary seem to have been his friends and colleagues, and it is evident that his working routines again primarily involved other men. They were only referred to by their surname and, for closer friends, without a title. Some names, such as Kinbom, C:son (Christiansson, his son-in-law), Cleophas and Seseman, occurred repeatedly, indicating a frequent socialising. As was the case on his travels, Kihlberg often met with men of higher rank, such as ironmasters, district judges, mayors, doctors of theology, barons and counts. They were always addressed properly, occasionally emphasised by ‘Excellency’ and the like. Even in his (more or less) private writing, the importance of titles and hierarchy were evident, indicating that Kihlberg followed social conventions and that he also was a bit mesmerised by people with higher social status. His eagerness to make such acquaintances during his journeys points in the same direction. There are no traces of ‘failed’ approaches in the diary, which of course is not to say that there were none; but there is one example when he was displeased with how he had been treated, when he declined an invitation for luncheon from Doctor Westén. The reason was that he had not been invited until 11 a.m. the same day whereas all the other guests had received their invitation the day before.36 This indicates that the invitation culture usually operated smoothly and it also underlines the importance of guarding ones’ position in the network. His whereabouts emphasise the importance of food and drinks when socialising. The diary meticulously reports on breakfast, luncheon and dinner in the company of friends and—focusing on more informal drinking gatherings—coffee, toddy and Swedish punch. Different kinds of drinks were the only thing specified, while the food was reduced to the meal in question. Not even for such a special occasion as the wedding of his daughter did he specify what was served. There was an ‘aquavit table’ right after the wedding ceremony, followed by a splendid dinner, which
Around and About 179 ended around midnight with coffee, Swedish punch and biscuits.37 The importance of this event is underlined by it being one of the lengthier entries in the diary. Life festivities, such as marriages and funerals, also offered opportunities to socialise and to eat and drink. A striking observation is that, during the first years that he kept his diary, Kihlberg rarely entertained guests at home, although he frequently was invited to the houses of friends. C:son was invited twice, for breakfast and dinner, but as a soon-to-be son-in-law he could almost be seen as part of the family.38 On another occasion he had visitors from Ströms holm staying overnight, and he gave them breakfast in the morning.39 Otherwise he did not return the hospitality of his friends until February 1811, when he had five close friends over for luncheon.40 After that it became a regular, although not very frequent, part of his life, perhaps linked to the death of his wife in 1809 and a reorientation of sociability— a point to which we return later. The amusement offered in Arboga could not be compared with that in Stockholm or in Västerås. There were some places just outside the town that were popular destinations for promenades and where larger feasts were often held.41 One sunny day in July 1808—‘clear blue sky and unusually warm all day’—he took an early morning walk together with his friend Cleophas and his family, to have breakfast at one of these places, Djupmyran. The warmth was most certainly the reason why they started out as early as they did, at 6 a.m. Walking back some hours later, he was bothered by the heat. That same evening, after dinner, he took another walk, to Kobergsgärdet, together with several unnamed women.42 From these and other examples, it is apparent that Kihlberg also socialised with women, often in mixed-sex gatherings; most of them were wives or daughters of his male friends and usually referred to as, for example, Mrs Cleophas. Musical and theatrical performances were enjoyed, but only rarely. The music was usually performed by military bands, either Swedish soldiers on march or Russian prisoners of war.43 When the Russians left Arboga— singing a Russian march—they were missed since they had behaved so well.44 The new leisure culture of assembléer had made its way to Arboga. Kihlberg visited one in the town hall in late December 1810, after a larger dinner party that had included a lot of drinking; another one followed three months later.45 An assemblée was a public dance evening, which often started with refreshments, followed by a concert and ended with dancing.46 As shown by Michael North in his study of cultural consumption in Germany, visiting concerts and theatres was one way to present oneself.47 Thus, Kihlberg’s participation in the entertainments at hand in Arboga or in Stockholm was not only about amusement and socialising but also about presenting himself as a person of importance. A special occasion in the year of 1808 was the appointment of the new mayor, Hjort. As mentioned earlier, Kilhberg was highly involved in the
180 Gudrun Andersson election preparations, and, once things were settled, it was an event to be celebrated. In the morning of 4 May, the Magistracy called on Hjort, and on the next day he was instated in the presence of the county governor. Courteous speeches were given by the county governor, the mayor himself and the deputy mayor (who wept during his speech). In the evening, Hjort instated himself in a social sense, hosting a large dinner party for sixty-two people.48 Royal visits were another special, as well as rare, occasion. Together with the rest of the Magistracy, Kihlberg honoured the crown prince Karl August when he passed through Arboga on his way to Stockholm.49 Later the same year he had a more distinguished task, namely to speak to Queen Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta (of Holstein-Gottorp) and to hand over some kringlor (a form of Swedish sweet pretzels), a pastry for which Arboga was renowned. He received the ‘grace’ to give her the same gift upon her return, a task that filled him with delight.50 According to his diary, Kihlberg lived a hectic life in Arboga. The daily social activities and the less frequent entertainments formed some sort of schedule of routines for him and his equals. One routine concerned the sex of the participants: while work-related activities took place in the company of other men, life festivities and entertainments were mixed-sex gatherings. Depending on the activity, Kihlberg had a good idea of the people with whom he was expected to meet and engage. Another routine concerned space. Michel de Certeau defines space as a ‘practiced place’: where place refers to the physical location, space contains the actions connected to place.51 Contrary to what one might expect, Kihlberg did not spend most of his working hours at the town hall, thus highlighting the importance of movement and of a variety of other spaces and places.52 How he referred to these in his diary depended upon their location. Within Arboga, he recorded ‘breakfast at Åström’s’, ‘dinner at Kinbom’s’ and ‘toddy at Doctor Westén’s’, suggesting that he conceived the spatiality of the town in terms of its inhabitants. When writing about his activities in Stockholm, on the other hand, he often included precise addresses. Thus, according to his references to different locations, Kihlberg’s daily Arboga routines seem to have been highly organised around a variety of activities away from home, whether related to work or to sociability. Space stands out as a key element in his routines, although it did not provide fixed day-to-day schedules. Considering that Arboga was a small town, with approximately 1,500 inhabitants, he probably travelled by foot, aligning his daily routines with Michel de Certeau’s assertion that ‘walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language or to the statements uttered’.53 As shown in the chapter by Bob Pierik and by the research project ‘Freedom of the streets’, access to the urban space was more general than has been assumed, not least according to gender.54 Still, that access was structured by hierarchies to be manifested and maintained,
Around and About 181 in a way resembling the social distinctions at play at the public pleasure gardens studied by Hannah Greig.55 Although Kihlberg did not mention mobility in this more analytical sense, it stands out as a structuring aspect of his life: by walking the streets of Arboga, alone or surrounded by friends and colleagues, Kihlberg claimed his place in that urban space.
At Home—Within the Household One difference between home and away was, naturally, the presence of family and the daily management of the household. When Kihlberg started writing his diary, he lived by the main square in Arboga, close to the town hall (see Figure 8.4). The household included his wife, Maria Ahlborg, their three daughters, Maria Sofia, Hedvig Charlotta and Lovisa Johanna (respectively twenty-two, seventeen and fifteen years old) and their son, Johan August (thirteen years old); their eldest child, Eric Adolph (twenty years old), had recently moved to Örebro.56 As with most urban households at the time, they needed to support themselves by some small-scale agricultural activities. As far as the diary
Figure 8.4 Map of Arboga c. 1800. Main square is indicated by c, town hall by d. Lantmäteriets historiska kartarkiv. Source: Lantmäteriet, Gävle.
182 Gudrun Andersson tells us, Kihlberg contributed quite a lot, cultivating rye and a variety of vegetables at their arable land in the outskirts of Arboga, seeing to the livestock and catching fish in the river.57 This was primarily intended for household consumption, but he managed to trade some fish for groceries. These contributions to the household seem to have been satisfying for Kihlberg: he always specified the kind of fish he had caught, sometimes emphasised by the expression ‘Gudilof’ (meaning ‘thank God’). One September evening he was watching his field of rye, declaring that it ‘Gudilof’ was beautiful.58 By contrast, there is only scarce evidence of his merchant business, such as setting up the booth at the market square and trading sugar, juniper berries and aquavit.59 With his journeys and all the councilman business, household management must often have been left to his wife, probably with the children assisting with the work. Management also included responsibility for the servants that were a part of the household, as in most early nineteenthcentury households, although the number of maids decreased substantially in a short period of time, from seven maids in 1805, to five in 1806, to one or two maids henceforth. Up until 1807 the household also contained one labourer.60 Being responsible for the servants was not an easy task, as will be evident. Kihlberg’s diary is generally written in a rather impersonal language, but it reveals strong emotional ties with his family. His children were the joy of his life, and he seems to have spent as much time with them as possible. He took them on shorter journeys, including a trip to Strömsholm in August 1808 with his eldest daughter, her fiancé and his youngest daughter. They had luncheon together and, while he conducted business in Utnäs, the rest of the family visited Strömsholm castle.61 He tried to meet with his eldest son Adolph—who lived in Örebro—whenever their paths were crossed; it was described as a ‘beloved surprise’ when Adolph visited his family home.62 He proudly reported on Adolph having the leading part in a (private) opera performance, given on the silver wedding anniversary of a member of the National Board of Trade.63 On one of his birthdays, the children arranged a surprise party for him, filled with all sorts of amusements. In the afternoon, he had friends over for coffee and supper, and he had, all in all, an enjoyable day.64 These examples show, again, how life festivities provided moments of both socialising and entertainment. Kihlberg showed a genuine and emotional concern for his children, not least their health. On his homecomings, he was always relieved to find the children in good health. Again, the feeling was emphasised by the exclamation of ‘Gudilof’.65 This concern about their health is understandable at a time when epidemics were part of daily life. At the end of April 1809, his wife and daughters fell ill with fever. The daughters eventually recovered, but his wife passed away on 5 May.66 If the children were the joy of his life, his wife was the burden, at least according to the diary. Up until her death, he again and again complained
Around and About 183 about their relationship. Usually, he merely stated the fact that he ‘got a scolding’ from ‘madam’. Already the consequent use of ‘madam’ instead of ‘wife’ indicates distance and irritation.67 On Easter Day of all days, she quarrelled ‘indescribably’, and luncheon was not served until 2:30 p.m., when she had calmed down.68 A couple of weeks later, she was again angry and did not make him any luncheon at all. Some days later, she scolded him for giving away one of the eels he had caught, instead of selling it and bringing some money into the household.69 Things calmed down, but towards the end of June, he wrote that ‘madam’, after being silent for some time, now scolded him with a vengeance. ‘God help me!’ he exclaimed.70 The frequent references to his wife not cooking him luncheon confirms that food preparation was a female task. More interestingly, it displays that his wife showed her discontent by not fulfilling her household tasks. The scolding continued in autumn, when he was ‘attacked’ by her, scolding him about a labourer he was not interested in hiring.71 This indicates that ‘madam’ was responsible for the servants of the household, a task she could not fulfil, according to Kihlberg. The quarrels escalated in December, and one reason was her poor housekeeping. The day before Christmas, one of the maids ran away, which was nothing new to the Kihlberg household: she was the fourth one to abscond since Michaelmas and was followed by another in early January.72 As Kihlberg became more explicit, we get close to the heart of the matter. He wrote a lengthy exposition on his wife’s incompetence and mismanagement of the household and her maltreatment of the servants.73 After one of his trips to Stockholm, he discovered that she had broken into his booth and sold off some aquavit, evidently without permission, thus trespassing on his domain, literarily as well as figuratively.74 It becomes increasingly clear that the household economy was strained, and the consequences of mismanagement were severe. Kihlberg’s appointment as steward for the town’s military storehouses in May 1808 had reduced his financial worries considerably but not solved them.75 In December, his estate was sold at auction to bring the household economy into order. This was a devastating blow for Kihlberg, who had lived on the estate for almost thirty years: ‘If I’d had another wife’, he complained, ‘or none, I could have saved the estate for the children, but tied to her, it is downright impossible even to try’.76 That no luncheon was served this day goes without saying. When they moved in April, it was with unspeakable sorrow.77 On top on everything, this is also the moment his wife and daughters fell ill. The marital conflicts seem to be centred on household responsibilities and the execution of tasks, on who was in charge. Hers was the responsibility of the domestic sphere, including preparing food and managing the servants, his was the public but also parts of the domestic sphere. It is impossible for us today to know how they were when they first married, in 1780, but their last years together were marked by
184 Gudrun Andersson hostility towards each other, and, for a decade, they had not shared a bedroom. When moving house, he reflected on the fact that he now had to leave the chamber where he had lived by himself since 1797.78 It is undoubtedly understandable that these were hard times for Kihlberg from a personal perspective. Writing about his hardships— vocalising his feelings of sorrow—might have been one way to handle the situation. The fact that the diary entries on his marital life often were more explicit and emotional than otherwise points in that direction. Another opportunity could be to talk to his friends. One evening, when he felt ‘awfully sad’, he went to one of the taverns, searching for a ‘good friend’.79 The purpose of seeing a friend could have been a mere diversion but could also have provided an opportunity to talk about his situation. It is of course impossible to determine what they talked about at the tavern, but it is possible that he discussed his domestic woes. One night in Stockholm when Kihlberg shared his lodging with the wholesale dealer Grönlund, his companion talked about his three marriages.80 It is apparent, then, that more personal matters were touched upon at least occasionally. The marital conflicts—and the effect they must have had on the household atmosphere—might be one reason why Kihlberg was reluctant to invite people home. Anyhow, Kihlberg was most certainly not emotionally unaffected by her death. When writing about her sickness and the funeral arrangements, he consistently switched to using ‘wife’ instead of ‘madam’. After her funeral on 10 May 1809, Kihlberg paused his diary for the rest of that year. He never remarried. Although their relation had been strained, she was one of the cornerstones of his life, and she left a void behind her. New routines had to be formed, one of which comprised increased invitations of friends over to his house.
Conclusions: Mobility and Sociability The diary of Kihlberg offers a glimpse into the daily activities and routines in the life of an early nineteenth-century councilman. It was a life filled with journeys, business and politics, economic management of the household, administrative tasks, family and friends, joy and sorrow. It was above all a life characterised by sociability and mobility. However, the daily routines did not comprise a strict schedule of what to do, or when and where to do it. Instead, the overall impression is that Kihlberg’s routines were characterised by complexity and flexibility. Again, a parallel can be drawn to Hannah Greig’s and Amanda Vickery’s study of the political day: ‘the use of time’, they suggest, ‘was strategic rather than improvident’.81 The extent of visits and socialising is astonishing. Nearly every day and often on several occasions there were visits to be made, often in combination with consuming food and/or drinks. Confirming existing relationships as well as forming new ones was of the utmost importance,
Around and About 185 politically, economically and socially. Kihlberg had access to different networks: his family (including his in-laws), very close friends (rather few in number) and a wider circle of friends, acquaintances and business partners (especially regarding politics). It is impossible to distinguish between business and socialising, between private and professional networks; instead they are closely intertwined, reinforcing each other. This might even be labelled as a hallmark of doing politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example, the importance of mixing pleasure and politics is found for the Swedish diet as well as in the English Parliament.82 The daily life of Kihlberg was framed by mobility that comprised several different spheres. When performing tasks related to household maintenance, his movements encircled the arable and pastureland, the market square and the Arboga river as well as the homes of his friends. His merchant business took him to several places nearby, as did his assignment as councilman. Occasionally, his mobility stretched as far as to Stockholm, most often in connection to his duties as a councilman. On his travels, he visited work-related places, like town halls, formal reception rooms and offices of different kinds—but also places related to more informal activities, like taverns, gardens and theatres. These spatial routines varied in several respects. The longer journeys were less frequent than the shorter ones, but all journeys contained a diversity of activities and were characterised by tight schedules. The same kind of diversity dominated his Arboga routines as well, although the distances of course were shorter. Sociability and mobility went hand in hand. They offered opportunities for Kihlberg to mobilise his more intimate and personal networks into larger ones; the delegation for electing a new mayor is a perfect example of this kind of intermingling of networks. Before entering the network of national politics, including a brief contact with the king, he supported the cause by using his Arboga network as well as his county network in Västerås. A well-developed mobility—facilitated by a strategic use of time—was a prerequisite for sociability. His marital relationship aside, Kilhberg conducted his networking and sociability successfully and eventually improved his economic circumstances. It comes as no surprise that his working life formed an important part of Kihlberg’s identity. In her study of identities as they appear in early modern English diaries, Tawny Paul emphasises ‘occupational fluidity’ as characteristic of the perception of work and for occupational identity. Multiple jobs and employments were at hand, as was the management of different kinds of resources, offices and civic responsibilities.83 There was clearly considerable flexibility when it came to livelihood and daily routines. This would probably be even more the case for a councilman, partly because the office brought with it a variety of tasks but mostly because he must already have had an ongoing and well-established business before he could even be considered for such an office.
186 Gudrun Andersson Kihlberg’s writings reveal great concern for his family and for household management, signifying that his private life was another important part of his identity. This is in line with Karen Harvey’s work on early modern British masculinity and domestic authority, where she emphasises the importance of the family group in the construction of men’s selfpresentation. ‘The house’, she concludes, ‘literally and metaphorically generated masculine identities’.84 Thus, the identity of an early modern councilman like Kihlberg—in no way dissimilar to other European urban scenes—was firmly anchored in his local settings but with connections to wider contexts where political, economic or social resources were available.
Notes 1. Rådmannens i Arboga Anders Adolph Kihlbergs dagbok 1808–1820, January 24, 1808, musei n:r 776, Arboga museums arkiv. Hereafter referred to as ‘Kihlberg, Diary’. 2. Within a month, the Russian army attacked Finland/Sweden, thereby starting the ‘Finnish war’ between Sweden and Russia. The peace agreement was signed in September 1809, whereby Sweden surrendered Finland and other eastern parts to Russia. 3. Axel von Fersens dagbok 1–4, ed. Alma Söderhjelm (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1925, 1926, 1928, 1936); Hedvig Elisabeth Charlottas dagbok 1–9, ed. Carl Carlson Bonde (1–3) and Cecilia af Klercker (4–9) (Stockholm: Norstedts, 1908–1942). The diary of von Fersen has been translated into English and French. 4. Karen Harvey, The Little Republic. Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 137; Brodie Waddell, ‘Writing History from Below: Chronicling and RecordKeeping in Early Modern England’, History Workshop Journal 85 (Spring 2018): 239–40. 5. Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort. Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 72; Harvey, The Little Republic, 139–50; Waddell, ‘Writing History’, 240–41. For further examples, see Hannah Greig and Amanda Vickery, ‘The Political Day in London, c. 1697–1834’, Past and Present (forthcoming). 6. Gudrun Andersson, ‘Varor på rad. Marknadsföring och konsumtionskultur i Dagligt Allehanda 1825–1845’, in Kommers. Historiska handelsformer i Norden under 1700- och 1800- talen, ed. Gudrun Andersson and Klas Nyberg (Uppsala: Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia, 2010), 152–53; Harvey, The Little Republic, 147, Brodie Waddell, ‘“Verses of My Owne Making”: Literacy, Work, and Social Identity in Early Modern England’, Journal of Social History 54, no. 1 (2020): 13. 7. Britt Liljewall, Vackra dagboken. Carl Henric Robsahms anteckningar från 1830-talet (Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag, 2017). 8. Ibid., 16–17. 9. Ibid., 18. 10. Greig and Vickery, ‘The Political Day’. 11. In a European perspective, Swedish towns were small. In 1810, Stockholm had 60,000 inhabitants; the second largest town, Gothenburg, had 15,000 and Arboga as few as 1,500.
Around and About 187 2. Kihlberg diary, 14 January–1 February 1808. 1 13. Ibid., 4–14 March, 29 September–24 October, 4–16 December 1808. 14. Ibid., 14 January 1808. 15. This is also emphasised by Greig and Vickery, ‘The Political Day’. 16. Kihlberg diary, 15–16 January 1808. 17. Ibid., 15–27 January 1808. 18. Ibid., 21–29 January 1808. 19. Ibid., 29 January 1808. 20. K. Tawny Paul, ‘Accounting for Men’s Work: Multiple Employments and Occupational Identities in Early Modern England’, History Workshop Journal 85 (Spring 2018): 27. On sociability and information, see Topi Artukka, ‘Informationsförmedlingens knutpunkter—den muntliga kommunikationens rum i det tidiga 1800-talets Åbo’, Historisk tidskrift för Finland 104, no. 1 (2019): 98. 21. Kihlberg diary, 10 December 1808. 22. Ibid., see e.g. 27 January; 10 March; 1, 5 October; 6, 11, 17 December 1808. 23. Dag Lindström, ‘Leisure Culture, Entrepreneurs and Urban Space: Swedish Towns in a European Perspective, Eighteenth-nineteenth Centuries’, in Leisure Cultures in Urban Europe, c.1700–1870. A Transnational Perspective, ed. Peter Borsay and Jan Jein Furnée (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 140–60; Topi Artukka, ‘Konstruktionen av ett urbant sällskapsliv. Åbo societetshus som centrum för societeten i början av 1800-talet’, Historisk tidskrift för Finland 103, no. 3 (2018): 395–427. For English examples, see e.g. David Coke and Alan Borg, Vauxhall Gardens. A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Hannah Greig, ‘ “All Together and All Distinct”. Public Sociability and Social Exclusion in London’s Pleasure Gardens, ca.1740–1800’, Journal of British Studies 51, no. 1 (2012): 50–75. 24. Lindström, ‘Leisure Culture’, 157. See also Jon Stobart, ‘Selling (Through) Politeness. Advertising Provincial Shops in Eighteenth-Century England’, Cultural and Social History 5, no. 3 (2008): 315. 25. Woodruff Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600– 1800 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 3–4. See also Michael North, Genuss und Glück des Lebens. Kulturkonsum im Zeitalter der Aufklärung (Köln: Böhlau, 2003), 217–18. 26. Kihlberg diary, 7, 10 October 1808. 27. Ibid., 1 December, 1810. 28. Ibid., see e.g. 26 February; 9 May; 2, 17 July; 28 August; 6–7 November 1808. These shorter journeys did not include staying away overnight. 29. Ibid., 15, 26 March 1808. The soldiers in question were Swedish, from the regiment of Uppland. 30. Ibid., 2, 17 July, 28 August 1808. 31. Ibid., 3 August 1810. 32. Ibid., 17 July 1808. 33. Ibid., 29 April 1809. 34. Greig and Vickery, ‘The Political Day’. 35. Ibid. 36. Kihlberg diary, 19 January 1810. 37. Ibid., 13 December 1810. 38. Ibid., 16 April 1809, 1 November 1810 (that is c. three weeks before the banns were published). 39. Ibid., 12–13 March 1809. 40. Ibid., 24 February 1811. 41. Ibid., see e.g. 3 June 1808.
188 Gudrun Andersson 2. Ibid., 1 July 1808. 4 43. Ibid., see e.g. 6 August 1808, 1 January 1810. 44. Ibid., 7 August 1808. 45. Ibid., 26 December 1810, 25 March 1811. 46. Lindström, ‘Leisure Culture’, 140–41. 47. North, Genuss und Glück, 2–3. 48. Kihlberg diary 4–5 May 1808. 49. Ibid., 17 January 1810. Karl August died in May the same year, and instead Jean Baptiste Bernadotte was elected as crown prince. 50. Ibid., 29 August, 14–15 October 1810. 51. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117. 52. See also Greig and Vickery, ‘The Political Day’. 53. de Certeau, The Practice, 97. 54. Danielle van den Heuvel, ‘Gender in the Streets of the Premodern City’, Journal of Urban History 44, no. 4 (2019): 693–710. 55. Gudrun Andersson, Stadens dignitärer. Den lokala elitens status- och makt manifestation i Arboga 1650–1770 (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2009), 218–21; Greig, ‘All Together’, 50–75. 56. Husförhörslängd 1805–1814, 1815–1824, AIa:6–7, Arboga stadsförsamling, Landsarkivet i Uppsala. Johan August followed his elder brother to Örebro in 1813 but returned to Arboga in 1815. Upon the death of their father, the two younger sisters moved in with their elder sister. 57. Kihlberg diary, see e.g. 14, 16 April; 4, 5, 7 May; 2–3 November 1808; 3, 5, June 1810. 58. Ibid., 15 September 1808. 59. Ibid., 11 January, 28 August, 12 October, 7 November, 31 December 1808. 60. Husförhörslängd 1805–1814, 1815–1824, AIa:6–7, Arboga stadsförsamling, Landsarkivet i Uppsala. In contrast to the maids, who all knew their catechism, the farmhand could not read at all and could not answer any questions concerning the religious texts. 61. Kihlberg diary 26 August 1808. 62. Ibid., 29 June 1811. 63. Ibid., 27 September 1808. 64. Ibid., 23 June 1811. 65. Ibid., 1 February, 16 October, 6 November 1808. 66. Ibid., 26–30 April, 4–5 May 1809. Kihlberg unfortunately outlived his youngest son Johan August, who died from consumption in April 1820, only four month before Kihlberg himself went ill and passed away. Död- och begravningsbok 1820, F:3, Arboga stadsförsamlings arkiv, Landsarkivet i Uppsala. 67. ‘Madam’ was used exclusively for his wife; other married women were referred to as ‘fru’. 68. Kihlberg diary 17 April 1808. This is a rare occasion when the wording had an ironic touch. Kihlberg described her quarrel as her way of ‘adorning the feast’. 69. Ibid., 4, 10 May 1808. 70. Ibid., 20 June 1808. 71. Ibid., 18 November 1808. Kihlberg described the man as being a fool. 72. Ibid., 23 December 1808, 5 January 1809. 73. Ibid., 22 December 1808. 74. Ibid., 31 December 1808. The actual ‘break in’ happened earlier, but he related it on New Year’s Eve, looking back at the year that had passed.
Around and About 189 75. Ibid., 31 December 1808. The economic constraints seems to have continued. When receiving a commission (from selling an estate) he thanked the Lord and wrote that it ‘was not all up with him’. Ibid., 8 September 1810. 76. Ibid., 22 December 1808. 77. Ibid., 21, 22, 25, 27 April 1809. 78. Ibid., 27 April 1809. 79. Ibid., 16 March 1809. 80. Ibid., 26 January 1808. 81. Greig and Vickery, ‘The Political Day’. 82. Karin Sennefelt, Politikens hjärta. Medborgarskap, manlighet och plats i frihetstidens Stockholm (Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag, 2011); Greig and Vickery, ‘The Political Day’. 83. Paul, ‘Accounting for Men’s’, 26. 84. Harvey, The Little Republic, 167.
9 Daily Lives Dislocated? Routine and Revolution in Britain’s North American Colonies Emma Hart
In June 1780, three Revolutionary Philadelphia diarists all reported the same event. Christopher Marshall, George Nelson and Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker universally noted the Pennsylvania government’s decision to implement martial law. Christopher Marshall, a retired gentleman apothecary, stated simply that the ‘president and councill’ had enacted this emergency measure. George Nelson, a clerk in the employment of George Washington’s Continental Army, remarked that it had been ‘declared to preserve waggons for the army’, and the militia was mustered on the city common. Sandwith Drinker, an elite Quaker woman, reported meanwhile how a captain of that militia had arrived at her house with a team of men, bayonets fixed, to requisition two of her family’s horses from their stables. With their differing accounts, our three diarists reveal how an individual’s position in the city affected their description of an event. Marshall, Drinker and Nelson were all assiduous record-keepers. Marshall wrote most prolifically, with daily entries in an unbroken run between 1774 and 1795. Drinker did not manage to write every day, especially during her childbearing years, but she had the most staying power as a diarist, keeping a regular record for an astounding forty-eight years between 1759 And 1807. Nelson’s diary is the least extensive, potentially because parts of the manuscript have not survived. With daily entries his record spans two years from 1780 to 1781, picking up again in 1790, when it covers another few years. All the journals are notable for their rich and varied content that largely avoids repetition. These were three people who occupied very different places in Philadelphia society in all sorts of ways, but they were nevertheless brought together by their diligent recording of the daily routines and circuits of their lives.1 Even a brief biography reveals just how different they were. Marshall was a stalwart of the Patriot government, in later life, with a secure income. He was an outsider in the sense that he had been ejected from the Quaker church in 1751 because of counterfeiting accusations. But in every other way, he stood at the heart of the Revolutionary city. He had been on numerous Revolutionary action committees from 1765’s Stamp
Daily Lives Dislocated? 191 Act onwards. His house—and the multiple properties he owned adjacent to it—were right at the centre of Philadelphia—just a few streets back from the busy Delaware river front.2 George Nelson, on the other hand, still existed within the deep embrace of his church—the Baptists. His life circled around Bible reading groups and church three times on a Sunday. When he was not at church, he was busy drawing up accounts or running errands for his boss, Jacob Hiltzheimer, a livestock merchant turned quartermaster of the Continental Army. Nelson was not a wealthy man, and he worried on numerous occasions how he and his fellow Americans would make it through the war. Enduring hard times towards the end of the conflict, Nelson put his faith in the hope ‘that God would be pleased to look down upon us and save us’. He rented his home from wealthy Quaker family the Pembertons, and it was clearly not as luxurious as Marshall’s. He was frequently woken up by rats scuttling through the wall cavities, and he rented out one room to a couple, who lived as part of his ‘houseful’ of people, along with his second wife.3 Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker was a member of the Philadelphia Quaker elite in every way. She was born into it and moved even more deeply into its embrace when she wed Henry Drinker, a Quaker merchant, in 1761. At this time, Quakers formed about a quarter of the city’s population. Elizabeth had been born and raised in Philadelphia, but her parents died when she and her sister were still in childhood. Living on Water Street, near the Delaware river, with a guardian, they were right at the centre of city life. She moved to a new house at 110 Front Street in 1771 when her husband, whom she had wed ten years earlier, was at the height of his commercial career. As staunch Quakers, the Revolution was not easy for the Drinkers. Henry was imprisoned for refusing to participate in the armed conflict. Elizabeth saw many of her elite friends flee the city after the British occupation ended in 1778 and a Patriot crackdown on Loyalists followed.4 For all three, their status in the city informed their response to martial law. Marshall, unaffected personally by the law and a man with a deep investment in the government he had helped to legitimise, reported it as a matter of fact. Nelson, whose first preoccupation was the potential of the law to make his job easier, focused on the public manifestations of its enactment and the practical ramifications. Drinker, the subject of the law as a propertied woman married to a man unpopular with the Revolutionary military, wrote as a victim of the action. Drinker was the only person whose property and indeed her home was impacted upon by the order. She acutely felt this consequence of the revolution in her private, domestic space. The male diarists, on the other hand, interpreted it as a public, political and practical event. This chapter uses the diaries of these three individuals to map out Philadelphians’ everyday spatial relationship to their city in an era that
192 Emma Hart encompassed the Revolutionary tumults of the later eighteenth century. In particular, the chapter explores the dialogue between identity and our diarists’ experience of the Revolutionary city. In their quest to understand the importance of cities to the American Revolution’s ferment, historians have principally focused on public spaces as key sites of political protest, discussion and conflict. Such an approach emphasises the ruptures that were undoubtedly part of this almost thirty-year process of separation from Britain. It also replicates what has been viewed as a sharp dichotomy between the public and the private in the American city. Yet, more recent scholars have shown that the two ‘spheres’ are very difficult to separate, politically, socially and economically. Just like other early modern city people, Philadelphians did not—and could not—easily sort their everyday spaces and the activities associated with them into two discrete parts.5 Given the potentially interlocking nature of these spheres, it is imperative that we look beyond the most visible spaces and events of the Revolutionary era if we are to grasp fully the nature of the event and its place in colonists’ everyday lives. Britain’s North American colonies were not caught up in the perpetual conflicts endured by many continental
Figure 9.1 A plan of the improved part of the city surveyed and laid down by the late Nicholas Scull (Philadelphia, 1762). Source: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Daily Lives Dislocated? 193 European townspeople. The contest for territory produced large-scale military mobilisation in North America for the first time only in the 1750s. Part of the Seven Years’ War, these events turned out to be a prelude to revolution, during which a majority of America’s cities saw action. New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Charleston were all occupied by the British army at some point between 1776 and 1783, and, even when they were not in this state of occupation, military forces were often nearby.6 Looking for new ways to insert early America’s urban spaces into our understanding of this conflict, historians have recently attended much more closely to the relationship between cities and the war. In Philadelphia, moments such as the Fort Wilson Incident—a 1779 battle-cum-food riot that resulted in the death of a number of men—or the Constitutional Convention have often taken centre stage.7 By directing our attention to the mundane relationship of these diarists to their surroundings, the focus on revolutionary tumult will be complemented with a richer picture of the everyday interactions between city dwellers and their environs. Such a focus can help historians to understand better the ways in which the extraordinary is so often refracted through the ordinary, routine aspects of life. Even when their focus is on Revolutionary times more than ordinary ones, historians must not forget to explore both. As well as balancing the extraordinary with the mundane in this discussion, we must also pay attention to the colonial as opposed to the European. Philadelphia was a colonial British city in the first bloom of youth. It was a status that strongly shaped the city’s institutional structures. There were fewer vested interests controlling government, owning property and holding onto wealth. Merchants, not aristocrats, formed the city’s elite. The population was also very diverse, consisting not only of Europeans from regions as varied as Scandinavia, Scotland, the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora and the German Palatinate but also of West Africans and Native Americans. Such characteristics made visitors to the city feel that, although it was familiar, it was also different, a theme picked up on by Swedish visitor Pehr Kalm, who singled out the fact that every (white) resident ‘enjoys such liberties that a citizen here may, in a manner, be said to live in his house like a king. It would be difficult to find anyone who could wish for and obtain greater freedom’.8 Nevertheless, Philadelphia was still an early modern place, constructed and bounded by the early modern technologies and values that also shaped its European counterparts. This meant its population existed as part of familiar social hierarchies that bestowed older, white men superior status and naturally discriminated against people on the basis of their wealth, gender and race. Such shared characteristics in turn produced strong commonalities between the Pennsylvania capital and its European counterparts; it was most frequently compared on the grounds of its bustling market and plentiful cultural opportunities. Philadelphia, pronounced one amateur poet, ‘would be the Athens of Mankind’ soon enough.9
194 Emma Hart It is, therefore, to these commonalities that the chapter turns as a framework for the analysis of the everyday spatial itineraries of this chapter’s subjects. The need to find provisions and fuel, maintain social connections and cope with the ever-present threat of illness punctuated our diarists’ daily circuits and the spaces frequented by them and their kin. Thus, I argue that the spatial geographies established by the fulfilment of these needs were the foundations of our subjects’ relationship to urban space. Such was the importance of these everyday needs that even severe events connected to the Revolution, namely the occupation of Philadelphia by the British military, were refracted through their fulfilment. Nevertheless, the process of satisfying these needs was principally dependant on the social status, gender and age of the city dweller. The application of a spatial approach to the everyday thus emphasises the way in which the rhythms of life above all sprung from the nature of the early modern ‘walking’ city and its social and gender structures. All of our diarists lived in Philadelphia, but they each experienced it through the necessities and constrictions of their particular circumstances. By establishing their diurnal itineraries, moreover, we come to a better understanding of the interaction between history’s ‘great’ events and its diurnal rhythms, dictated by early modernity, that meaningfully shaped townspeople’s lives, day in, day out.
The Spatial Itineraries of the Everyday To be a European settler of North America in the seventeenth century was to be a risk-taker in an already uncertain world. Although William Penn had carefully planned Philadelphia as part of his 1682 Frame of Government, the town remained quite small and devoid of the regular amenities of urban life for a good number of decades. It did not have its own government for more than twenty years. When a corporation was finally established in 1701, efforts to order the city merely revealed the extent of disorder. Poor roads, shambolic market authorities and constant disobedience by colonists to the local authorities were all regular occurrences.10 By the time our three diarists were writing, however, Philadelphia had overcome its uncertain beginnings to become a flourishing city with around 40,000 inhabitants. With a population so large that it would be the largest in British America shortly after the Revolution’s conclusion, its trade was booming. The city was replete with civic, religious and cultural institutions that made it into a principal gathering place for enlightened Americans seeking refined people, places and possessions. It had splendid examples of classical architecture, along with shops filled with the latest fashionable imports from Europe and India and seats of learning such as Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company. With Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette at the vanguard, a lively news and print culture
Daily Lives Dislocated? 195 had evolved. At the dawn of the revolutionary era, this was a city fully enjoying the fruits of the enlightenment ‘improvement’ that was transforming Britain’s provincial towns.11 Drinker, Nelson and Marshall’s patterns of movement and their interactions with other people and with the built environment were stamped by their residence in such an early modern English-speaking city. Their main tasks involved coordinating food supplies for people and animals, finding fuel for heating and cooking, carrying out laborious household chores, visiting friends and family who were part of a close-knit network of work and personal acquaintances and dealing with the ever-present prospect of illness. Because of the importance of these three categories— food and fuel, family and friends and fever, as one might term them—the chapter uses them as the lens through which relationships between our diarists and the everyday spaces of Philadelphia were refracted. Marshall, Nelson and Drinker consistently prioritised these foci of daily existence in their written records. They all devoted costly ink and paper to describing extraordinary events such as martial law, remarkable deaths, military manoeuvres, extreme weather or political debate. Yet, the bulk of their daily entries were concentrated around routine activities. Importantly, discussion of the everyday was not cursory—a case of diarists wanting to find something to write down but lacking anything truly ‘noteworthy’. Thus, it is possible to read the rich description of everyday routines and contacts—and the spatial itineraries they created—as genuinely reflective of their importance to Marshall, Nelson and Drinker. Very noticeable in their entries, moreover, is the centrality of the diarist’s social status and gender (and to some degree life-stage) to the formation of these diurnal circuits.12 Let us begin with the work of provisioning. A constant and pressing need of every human being, the necessity of acquiring food was an essential force determining the relationship of our diarists to the city that they inhabited. By the eighteenth century, Philadelphia had two well-stocked, if not overly well-organised, marketplaces: a central market that ran the length of Market Street from the Delaware River front and a second South Market established in Society Hill. Retail and wholesale shops and stores lined Front Street, where Drinker lived from 1771 onwards—and also Market Street, where Benjamin Franklin’s print shop was located. The city was surrounded by market or ‘truck’ gardens, in which farmers grew produce for urban consumption. The main market had a special section for New Jersey farmers, who brought their produce in boats across the Delaware River. City dwellers could obtain groceries such as tea and sugar from a wide range of stores that clustered alongside the main market and the river front. These were packed with imported goods, brought not only from Britain but also from its East and West Indies.13 Elizabeth Drinker appeared to be the least preoccupied of all our diarists with the acquisition of food and other goods. As an elite married
196 Emma Hart woman, who had her unmarried sister in her household too, she was likely able to leave the task of household provisioning and management to servants and family members. The marketplace did not feature in the register of urban spaces she personally frequented, and she remained unconcerned about where the next meal for her family would come from. Before she was married in 1761, Drinker (like other Quaker women diarists) recorded leisure shopping expeditions with her female friends to buy needlework supplies, clothing or just to take ‘a walk . . . to several shops’.14 Yet, such excursions disappeared once she wed her husband Henry. In the midst of her child-bearing years following her marriage, Drinker actually spent a good portion of time outside Philadelphia, sojourning at her family’s suburban estate at Frankford or on leisure trips to Lancaster and to local spas where she took the waters. During the 1760s and 1770s, Drinker’s relationship to the city does not appear to have been an especially intimate one; indeed she exclaimed that, if her husband were to have no need of ever being in town, she thought she ‘could be very happy in ye country’.15 Although her home on Front Street was in the thick of the city’s commercial heart, as a young, elite mother and wife, she enjoyed a mobility not just beyond her house but beyond the limits of Philadelphia itself. For Christopher Marshall and George Nelson, their social status worked in tandem with their gender to foster quite different—and in some ways more intimate—relationships with commercial space. Marshall, who was of middling status and in later life, had the time and the money to visit shops and auction houses regularly to purchase clothing and books. A typical note described how he ‘drank coffee and then went to Bell’s auction’, an indication of his frequent dips into the retail scene, which he also drew on for new shoes.16 Marshall’s commercial experience extended to a good knowledge of where one might obtain food and firewood, but it did not mean that the retired apothecary regularly visited these places himself. Rather, Marshall regularly noted the visits of his spouse and their servants to these places; when his wife got up at 4 a.m. to go to market or rushed down to the wharves to watch them in anticipation of a load of firewood arriving, he sympathetically noted the labour necessary to provision his household. George Nelson’s everyday spatial circuits incorporated Philadelphia’s markets to a greater extent even than Marshall’s. The poorest of our three diarists, Nelson took a personal and active interest in where his next meal was coming from in a household that seems to have needed all hands on deck to keep food on the table. He visited the marketplace himself to purchase meat and vegetables, on one occasion going on a Saturday despite the fact that he had ‘felt very unwell all day’.17 The clerk’s knowledge of provisioning and its workings was especially good because his niece and nephew, who resided on a Bucks County farm, sometimes
Daily Lives Dislocated? 197 lodged overnight with him when they came to town to sell produce. The small-time dealer and army clerk also kept a close eye on the weather to see when the ice broke on the Delaware river, allowing wood boats to once again dock at the wharves. It is possible this was a necessary vigilance because Nelson could not afford to buy in bulk at the beginning of winter like the Marshalls. Indeed, he often took payment for odd jobs in firewood and commented when he had managed to accumulate enough fuel to last him the winter.18 Drinker, Marshall and Nelson all lived in a commercial city that their households necessarily drew on for food and fuel. Nevertheless, their position in urban society produced dramatically different relationships to these spaces of trade. Marshall did not personally experience the early mornings and bustle of the crowds at the market and the wharf. Instead, his Philadelphia was a city viewed from home as a place from which daily necessities must be extracted by someone else but encompassing auctions and shops where he might personally purchase books and other desirable items at leisure. George Nelson also perused the city for consumer durables, but, as a poorer man, his knowledge of the provisions market was more intimate. Nelson’s grateful notes of being supplied with ‘dinner’ by his employer, Jacob Hiltzheimer, were also perhaps an expression of relief that he did not need to worry about an empty belly or hope that the butchers in the marketplace would have affordable cuts of meat on offer. Drinker, meanwhile, appeared much less intimate with Philadelphia’s markets. As a woman with small children and an array of servants and relatives to assist her in keeping up the household, she remained detached from commercial space. If the life circumstances and gender of a city dweller determined their intimacy with commercial spaces, it almost wholly shaped the character of their social circuits. The enlightenment city was a place of public intercourse and private chatter, but a resident’s movements through this urban world was dependent on their status. We have already seen how Elizabeth Drinker’s visits took her out of the bustle of Philadelphia and into the suburban mansions of the region’s Quaker elites. Her loose attachment to the city was a function of both her gender and her social status. As a wealthy woman, she had no need of being in her town house to earn a living. At the time that she had wed, her husband had begun building himself his suburban home at Frankford—a prestige residence to show off his status. After her marriage and during her childbearing years, staying at Frankford meant that Drinker could maintain her social contacts in elite circles, while enjoying more space in which to raise her growing brood. At one point, Drinker handed over her youngest to a rural wet nurse yet was able to stay close by and visit him each day. Frankford was also a launchpad for trips around the region taken by Drinker when accompanying her husband. Travelling through New Jersey and Western Pennsylvania, Drinker stayed at inns and took in the sights, visiting
198 Emma Hart among other things the renowned glass works at Mannheim. In the later 1760s and early 1770s, she retained only a loose connection to her urban home and its surroundings. Such geographically expansive social circuits strongly contrasted with the everyday spaces frequented by our less privileged diarists. Christopher Marshall was a man in the later stages of life with three adult sons (some with families of their own) also resident in Philadelphia and recently married to his second wife. Marshall’s own house, situated on Chestnut Street between Second and Third Streets, was the centre not only of an assemblage of properties that he owned but also of his social world. Indeed, one could argue that his house had assumed a special importance in Marshall’s life because of his ejection from the Quaker church. Unlike Drinker, who still frequently attended meetings and George Nelson, for whom worship formed a pillar of his daily existence, the apothecary noted no such religious activities. Indeed, Mrs Marshall’s constant provisioning trips were necessary precisely because their home was the epicentre of endless rounds of social calls, suppers and tea drinking. Mr Marshall’s sons and their wives were often in attendance, as were a close circle of male friends, with whom the diarist kept in constant dialogue. For Marshall, it is clear that such activities were both a duty and a pleasure; as a patriarch he expected his offspring to attend him at his house. When this did not happen, Marshall noted the grudge in his diary, which he used as a method to sett down distinctly their behaviour and visits in order yt after I am gone they may see I was not an idle spectator of their conduct, and yet I deserve more respect than they show me. I forgive them.19 This was a record for chiding as well as remembering. It was also for boasting, however, as when prominent American politicians came to Philadelphia for the meeting of the Revolutionary Continental Congress in 1775, Marshall proudly noted dinner and conversation in his home with the likes of eminent South Carolina radical Christopher Gadsden.20 Marshall could attract such men to his home because of his status as a leading gentleman politician. This was a role that he also enacted at his regular coffeehouse, which he attended in the afternoon numerous times a week. At ‘the place’ as he called it, Marshall conversed on the issues of the day with his middling Philadelphia compatriots in an environment that was, because of his frequent visits, a home away from home. Either ‘abroad’ or ‘chiefly employed in reading and writing etc.’ at home, Marshall enjoyed the life of the polite gent of letters, and his residence as much as the coffeehouse was the chief stage for the creation of this persona.21 Nelson, on the other hand, could quite literally only dream of mixing with such esteemed company; in the spring of 1781 he awoke to find that he had dreamt of winning a bet on ‘something greatly for the benefit of
Daily Lives Dislocated? 199 America . . . which several Members of Congress interested themselves in on my behalf’.22 The reality was that languishing in such polite environments was not a possibility for Nelson, whose relative poverty and religious mores worked together to mitigate against his entrance into them. Nelson very occasionally received visitors, sometimes hosting one or two male acquaintances who came to meet in a ‘Friendly Society’ or to sing psalms with him. At other times, he found company with the couple who rented a room, the Aigers—subletters who were part of the clerk’s orbit not as members of any polite society but as an essential source of income. Overall, Nelson’s diary betrays the strong impression that it was not common for him to receive company at home, often because his busy clerkship did not afford him the opportunity to be there very much. Nelson’s employer, Jacob Hiltzheimer, frequently called him to his house at odd hours to undertake urgent duties. On one occasion he was needed at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning, disrupting his usual sabbath worshipping schedule.23 In comparison to Marshall, Nelson’s home fit into his everyday spatial itineraries differently. It was not the extension of a daily round of polite conversation and sociability that merged domestic and public space into one zone of genteel self-fashioning. Rather, it was more of a functional space to which he might retreat when not busy with work or at church. Yet, for both men—in their older years and cared for by their second wives—the city home was a centre of activity much more than it was for Elizabeth Drinker. Their domestic spaces formed an anchor for urban circulations, their other activities rippling outwards from this centre of gravity. Nevertheless, the men’s circuits in the city drew together different constellations of spaces because of their social status and their religious practices. As Nelson shuttled between home, church, Bible study and the office he occupied with his employer, Marshall bounced from home to coffee house to the homes of his children and closest acquaintances.
Everyday Itineraries and Their Disruptions These circuits, strongly dictated by social status and gender, were foundational to our diarists’ lives. So central were they, in fact, that potential disruptions caused them not to be abandoned but rather adjusted to accommodate changed circumstances. Indeed, the necessity of adjusting— but not discarding—habitual circuits and spaces of movement was also a function of the ways in which social status and gender had shaped them in the first place. There are two principal sources of disruption that emerge in the diaries—illness and Revolutionary events. Significantly, ill health—or the fear of succumbing to it—was the more persistent interruption to established habits. Among these Philadelphians, their own ailments and those of their close relatives forced a recalibration of daily lives to accommodate their impact.
200 Emma Hart The most radical move one could make in response to illness was to leave the city altogether when it was about. It was her desire to keep her infant children away from urban epidemics that appears to have been one of the motivations behind Drinker’s rural sojourns in the years leading up to the Revolution. In fact, this period of her diary is more a catalogue of her offspring’s health and the dangers presented to it than anything else. Drinker noted when smallpox, whooping cough and other less identifiable illnesses were present in the houses of friends and acquaintances. She monitored the state or her own children’s health closely, keeping them confined when they were at risk of being swept up in a passing wave of infection. Once, in 1766, she admitted that she had kept ‘my little ones in the house more than is agreeable’ in an effort to avoid the smallpox. As an elite woman with a suburban estate at her disposal, Drinker had the means of staying away from the density of the city. Unsurprisingly, it was a strategy she grasped eagerly in a quest to preserve the lives of her young brood.24 Christopher Marshall also had the means to retreat to the safety of the home when he was ill. The apothecary had successfully nurtured three children through the dangers of illness, but, advancing in years, he succumbed to long periods of ill-health in the course of his diary. A highly social individual who visited his coffeehouse and his sons almost daily, Marshall was suddenly confined to his house in February 1777 by severe leg pain—possibly an attack of the gout. Instantly, the limits of Marshall’s world shrunk to the four walls of his bed chamber. It would be 14 April before he ventured outside his home, on a short walk to the wharves on the Delaware River after which he pronounced himself to be ‘exceeding week and tired’. In the intervening months he had been fortified by visits from close friends and ‘strangers’ alike, who kept him occupied with conversation and news. Until 2 April he ‘kept close in my little room’, his only contact with the outside world achieved when he ‘looked out of the front windrows thro’ the glass into the street’, seemingly yearning to be part of the urban bustle once more. As soon as he could, Marshall expanded his world, first by getting dressed and venturing to the front room where he warmed himself next to ‘a good fire’ and then by taking some air on the balcony. Throughout this period of ill-health Marshall keenly felt his isolation from the company that he usually found in the sociable spaces of Philadelphia and had obviously become integral to his routine. Consequently, he made strenuous efforts to keep up these habits, initially by increasing the role of his home as his principal social space and then by getting back to his coffeehouse and his visiting as soon as was physically possible.25 When we read about George Nelson’s health difficulties, however, we can see that this type of ‘withdrawal’, practiced to differing degrees by both Drinker and Marshall, was a luxury available mostly to the wealthier segments of the Philadelphia population. For poorer city dwellers like
Daily Lives Dislocated? 201 Nelson, the need to maintain an income forced them to carry on their customary itineraries despite sickness. The clerk complained often about feeling ill, but taking to his bed was a last resort. On militia manoeuvres on an especially hot August day in 1781, when the ‘glasses were up at 96’ he was overcome with a fever—probably heat exhaustion.26 Running a high temperature on another occasion, he attempted to carry on working until his boss Hiltzheimer instructed him that he could return home to recover. In the winter of 1790, then in his fifty-sixth year, Nelson suffered more long-term malaise. By then an independent grocery dealer working out of a warehouse on the Philadelphia wharfside, he endured a fever that was debilitating enough to make him spend three days out of the city at his relatives’ farm in Bucks County. His suffering was further compounded in the wintertime when the necessity of trudging back and forth through snowy streets in the name of his dealing caused his feet to be swollen with the cold and very painful to walk on. Only by smothering them in goose fat and wrapping them in rags did Nelson manage to continue.27 While illness had a persistent ability to disrupt or adjust everyday circuits in the early modern city, political turmoil was a more sporadic, though potentially more extreme, threat. Both early American and early modern historians have contemplated at length the effects of war and military occupation on urban life. The eighteenth century was an era in which large armies increasingly intruded on civilian populations as they launched year-round campaigns, aiming to occupy territory. For local people, the armies in their midst could represent a business opportunity, but they were also an unwanted nuisance and source of crime and disorder. In Europe, the famous attack on Bergen-op-Zoom in the Netherlands during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) left many civilians dead. The Thirty Years’ War ravaged some urban economies so badly that they took almost a century to recover—if they ever did.28 In the context of the American Revolutionary War, Donald Johnson and Lauren Duval have recently proposed that the difficult-to-define nature of the war (civil or imperial?) and the differing understandings of the rules of engagement were critical in determining its impact. A city’s occupation could severely test the loyalist or patriot leanings of its residents, while British attempts to divest patriot men of their status and power could backfire because of profound misunderstandings about the role of women and enslaved people as property and property owners in colonial society. In sum, war had an array of subtle and complex impacts on the urban environment, which itself played an active role in the situation. This dynamic suggests that, just as ‘public’ and ‘private’ may overly simplify the contrasts of urban space in peace time, ‘destruction’ or ‘survival’ may be a paradigm with similar failings when it comes to the question of war and the city.29 Regarding the impact of war through the lens of the spatial circuits established by our diarists offers a fresh perspective—one that reveals
202 Emma Hart how these routines endured. War did severely affect some resident’s established itineraries, especially if they were loyalists and had their property confiscated. However, none of our diarists—nor indeed the vast majority of people—suffered such a fate to the extent that it wholly upset their lives and their relationship to the urban landscape. If anything, the capacity of these elemental needs to determine the relationship of our diarists to their everyday spaces only increased in the face of events that threatened livelihoods and supplies. Once again, however, our diarists show how social status and gender were strong determinants in the way such threats presented themselves and were managed. Representing a range of political outlooks on the Revolution, Drinker, Nelson and Marshall’s reactions to events displayed their varying opinions of its political goals. As a woman, Drinker was only sometimes considered as—and considered herself to be—a political person. Nevertheless, her diary makes it clear that she did not hold the Patriot cause in high esteem, especially when its Philadelphia adherents banished her husband from the city and exiled him in Virginia after he held fast to his Quaker pacifism in refusing to take up arms against the British. Her commentary on Revolutionary events reflected her ambivalent outlook; her comment that ‘we have had a fussy day of it’ following a lavish fireworks display for the French king’s birthday was indicative of her lack of enthusiasm for vigorous displays of patriotism.30 Christopher Marshall was one of those ardent Philadelphia patriots who had helped to send Henry Drinker into exile, and he continued as an enthusiastic and prominent adherent to the cause throughout the war and its aftermath. He served on numerous revolutionary committees, and his diary is replete with detailed accounts of political events, including many in which he took an active role, often at the coffeehouse. Marshall noted approvingly when men who disobeyed the ordinances of the patriots received punishment and did not betray any doubt that the rituals of public shaming they often had to endure were both necessary and legitimate. Whether he was not a prominent enough citizen or whether he lacked the enthusiasm is not clear, but George Nelson was not as active a patriot. He clearly had no trouble supporting the cause; as well as working for the Continental Army, he expressed plenty of disapproval of British actions and served in the patriot militia.31 Neutral cynic, ardent revolutionary, willing supporter of the American cause—in the end, this spectrum of positions had only a moderate influence on the routines of our diarists during the Revolution’s most intense years. All fretted when the military conflict threatened to engulf their city or when they heard of major clashes unfolding elsewhere; at about the same time as June 1780’s martial law, the diarists were universally troubled by the news that Charleston was under siege by the British. All commented on the difficulties of provisioning their households when the war disrupted supply lines and prompted price gouging in the marketplace.
Daily Lives Dislocated? 203 In short, war made everyone’s existence in the city feel more precarious, regardless of their political predilections. Beyond these shared disruptions, however, the Revolution’s potential to unsettle everyday spatial itineraries was notable mostly for the degree to which it was refracted through status and gender, rather than its ability to destroy them altogether. Elizabeth Drinker perhaps had the largest adjustments to make in the wake of her husband’s incarceration. His disappearance saw her leaving off trips to their Frankford residence and relocating her family to the city residence at 110 Front Street. Hence, where Drinker had had the loosest attachment to her urban house of all the diarists before the conflict hit Philadelphia, during the occupation and in its aftermath this state of affairs was completely reversed. Drinker almost became a prisoner in her own home. Indeed, she noted when she left the house in late 1777 how she ‘had not been from home before, except to meeting since my dear left me’.32 On 4 April 1778 Drinker left home in what was her first excursion outside of Philadelphia in almost a year; this was a trip to Lancaster, PA, where the Patriot government was stationed during the British occupation, to negotiate the release of her husband. Drinker, along with the several other Quaker women she went with, successfully achieved her goal, and on 30 April, her husband returned home. Drinker’s confinement in her house was made more dramatic by the actions of the British army, who were notoriously disorderly and demanding. On one occasion in late 1777, a drunk soldier invaded her home, brandishing his sword at Drinker, her sister and their servants. By the end of the year she had to endure a British officer who had been billeted in their home. Gradually, our officer moved his lodgings from ye blue Chamber to ye little front parlor; so that he has ye two front parlors, a Chamber up two pair of stairs for his baggage, and ye Stable wholly to himself; besides ye use of the kitchen.33 Drinker clearly resented his takeover of her house. None of these disruptions, however, forced Drinker to change the fact that domestic spaces—and not commercial spaces—were the anchor to her daily circuits. A network of friends helped her, a single woman, to obtain any necessaries; in mid-winter a bundle of firewood was dropped off at her house thanks to the intervention of family friend Robert Waln, who had ‘engaged it for us’. At other times, meat and butter was delivered in a similar fashion. Servants, including African ‘black Tom’ undertook household labour and the fetching of supplies.34 Following her husband’s return from exile, and the departure of the British from Philadelphia in mid-1778, Drinker’s world expanded again, but it never reached the capaciousness of the pre-Revolutionary years.
204 Emma Hart She once more visited their suburban home in Frankford on occasion but never for longer than a night. This spatial recalibration thus involved the refashioning of Front Street as her principal social hub, with Drinker noting many more visits from friends and acquaintances at the house. Indeed, there were often overnight guests, and many days involved additional visitors coming through, the high traffic leading Drinker to note in August 1780 how ‘we have had company, which is as usual’.35 It is hard to estimate the degree to which the socialisation of the Drinker house was a direct consequence of the Revolution, but the events of 1777 and 1778 had certainly changed Elizabeth’s spatial circuits to a dramatic degree, setting up the situation in which she operated out of her city home rather than her suburban location. Nevertheless, her network of friends remained constant; Emlens, Sansoms, Walns and Pembertons who were her fellow Quaker elites. Attributing such a shift in itinerary purely to the revolution is difficult, however, because Drinker’s life-stage and gender also contributed to the change. Most of her children were now older, of school age and out of the extreme danger zone of early childhood illness. Their increasing maturity also led to the parlour of the Front Street house periodically being transformed into a school room, where Drinker’s own daughters and some of her friends’ offspring received instruction from a local schoolmaster. At the same time, Drinker’s own advancing age meant that an unanticipated pregnancy had a heavy impact on her mobility. From July 1781 until the birth of her son in October, she remained limited to her home, much as Christopher Marshall had been during his episode of ill health shortly before the British occupation of Philadelphia. Drinker declared herself ‘not in fitt trim to go abroad’, concluding that her confinement was not bad since she was ‘no great goer abroad at any time’.36 Her world had become both more urban and more circumscribed, but this was largely a result of her advancing years and the maturity of her children. Age was also the primary reason for Christopher Marshall’s decision to leave Philadelphia and the dense networks of friends and family that sustained him and made his home the social centre that Drinker’s was now becoming. The Revolution therefore had an impact on his everyday spaces—but only partly because of his ardently patriot affiliation. In April 1777, in the depth of his illness and resulting confinement, Marshall noted that ‘should this city be invaded’ he would ‘not be capable to render any assistance’. His state of health prompted him to send his wife and son to Lancaster to look for a new house, in which Marshall would eventually sit out the Revolution. It was evident that the prospect of being forced by the British to take an oath of loyalty and imprisoned on refusal was not a happy one for an aging patriot such as Marshall. Nevertheless, the apothecary did not rush back to Philadelphia following the British departure in the summer of 1778. Although he paid brief
Daily Lives Dislocated? 205 visits to his hometown, he continued to reside in Lancaster until peace was declared officially in 1783.37 In their new Lancaster home, the couple did their utmost to recreate the spatial itineraries that had structured their daily existence in Philadelphia. In his diary, the apothecary left little doubt that his wife shouldered most of the work of re-establishing circuits of provisioning. Mrs Marshall went to market to find food for the household or visited surrounding farms in a quest for the supplies that she could not find in town. Mr Marshall spent his mornings writing and received visitors in the afternoon. He sometimes wandered into town, no doubt seeking out (but often failing to find) the company he had enjoyed in his coffee house in Philadelphia.38 Indeed, there were novel aspects to their diurnal routine borne of their new, semi-rural, situation. Every morning, Marshall noted how he had ‘fed the creatures’—the horses, cow, chicken and pigs that they now had space to keep. Their house came with a handsome orchard bearing bumper crops of apples. With this bounty at their disposal, Mr Marshall noted proudly how his wife became an efficient and productive manager of this smallholding, which seemed to demand an intensification of her Philadelphia housekeeping duties. Thus, in January 1778, he broke off his routine diary entries to explain that he had not given Mrs Marshall’s ‘engagement’ the attention that it deserved because ‘entring them minutely would take up most of my time, for this genuine reason that from early in the morning to late at night she is constantly imployed in the affairs of the family’.39 Marshall then listed the tasks that had kept his wife (and, his diary revealed, their unnamed enslaved woman and manservant Anthony) so busy: drying apples, cooking meals, cleaning, making cider, washing fine clothes, producing twenty large cheeses from their one cow, sewing and knitting. He closed by sentimentally claiming ‘who can find a virtuous woman for her price is far above rubies’. The Marshall household may have moved fifty miles west, but this only seemed to accentuate it as the centre of gravity for the couple’s economic and social routines.40 Marshall was able to orchestrate his move because he had the financial resources and the support of family and friends to do so. His ability to relocate as a couple meant that his wife would not suffer as a single woman cut off from family and friends in an unfamiliar environment—the fate of Drinker had she left Philadelphia. As someone lacking both money and family support, George Nelson endured the Revolution in very different circumstances, however. Although he was younger than Marshall—in his forties at the time of the British occupation—he was not in the prime of life and suffered bouts of ill health. Yet, he did not have the means either to escape the disruption or to avoid service. He spent the entire period of the occupation on militia duty, presumably leaving his wife to fend for herself without his income. As previously noted, Nelson’s involvement with the militia
206 Emma Hart required him to leave home for exercises too, one of which resulted in severe heat exhaustion. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Drinker’s family bought her husband out of militia service by selling off fine mahogany and walnut furniture to raise the fees.41 Nelson’s relative poverty thus determined the location of his revolution. Whereas Drinker sought refuge in her Philadelphia home, Nelson endured sporadic absences from his because of his lack of financial resources. Where Marshall could afford to leave a city enduring turmoil for the opportunity to play gentleman farmer in Lancaster, Nelson had to stay in the city in the chaotic wake of the occupation, fretting about how he would afford adequate food on unreliable army pay and in the midst of shortages and inflated prices. As a lady of leisure with a houseful of servants and relatives, the question of hunger did not trouble Drinker’s conscience, even though she lived in the same city as Nelson. Ultimately, political affiliation had remarkably little influence on the everyday spaces and experiences of these revolutionary Philadelphians. Instead, the impact of events on their situation was focused on the potential of the conflict to disrupt itineraries associated with provisioning the household, maintaining a social life and coping with illness. The ability of our diarists to manage this disruption and continue their established routines was, in turn, a function of the resources available to them.
Conclusion: Routines Restored? Familiar spaces—and the everyday itineraries created by moving through them—provided the scaffolding of our diarists’ lives. These circuits were strongly shaped by their individual circumstances—their gender, social status and life-stage. Such routines were not fundamentally destroyed by crises, principally illness and Revolutionary War. Rather, Marshall, Nelson and Drinker responded with efforts to continue their routines as much as possible. As such, their situation guided these efforts as much as it had the establishment of everyday itineraries in the first place. Suffering from a bout of tinnitus in late 1778, Christopher Marshall imagined his condition as like the sound of the trumpet in order to alarm us by letting us know that this is not our rest nor place of abode. Being no other but as different stages or removes for to pass thro’ in order to reach that happy resting place.42 About the same time Elizabeth Drinker’s close contemporary Hannah Griffitts composed a poem about the Revolution The Glorious fourth—again appears A Day of days—and year of years.
Daily Lives Dislocated? 207 The scene of sad disasters Where all the mighty gains we see With all their boasted Liberty Is only—Change of Masters.43 Marshall’s musings and Griffitts’s poem present two different views of time: one linear, that imagines the routines of days, months and years merely as an episode in man’s progress towards heaven and the other cyclical, where things may seem to progress but in reality remain the same. Among our diarists, both of these modes of time are relevant to understanding the place of everyday spaces in their revolutionary experiences. At different life-stages, Marshall, Drinker and Nelson’s diurnal spatial registers were often produced by their experiences as younger, middle-aged, and aging. At other times, however, the repetitive demands of everyday tasks brought a more cyclical character to their itineraries around the city. What is more, the seemingly fixed nature of their social status and gender meant that, even as the Revolution progressed, their interaction with their immediate surroundings would always be refracted through their situation. Drinker’s womanhood and motherhood meant that the Revolution brought not ever-increasing circuits of spatial experience but insistently decreasing ones. Nelson’s relative poverty and his ardent religiosity made his life into something punctuated with the routine of maintaining an income and going to church. Only Christopher Marshall, afforded the privilege of contemplation while writing his diary at his bucolic Lancaster retreat, had the time to step outside the immediate spaces that he occupied and ponder his situation in a more abstract manner. Even then, Marshall’s first ambition was to recreate the everyday itineraries that had structured his existence in Philadelphia.
Notes 1. Both Nelson’s and Marshall’s diaries are kept in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and I used these unpublished documents as the basis of this chapter. An abridged version of Marshall’s diary was published in the nineteenth century but is very brief in its content, see William J. Duane, ed., Extracts from the Remembrancer of Christopher Marshall, 1774–1781 (Philadelphia: Crissy & Markley, 1839). Elizabeth Drinker’s diary has been published in its unabridged form, and I used this version, namely Elaine Forman Craine, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker, 3 vols. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991). 2. Christopher Marshall, Finding Aid to Collection 395, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter HSP). 3. George Nelson Diary, AM 107, HSP. 4. ‘Introduction’, in Diary of Elizabeth Drinker, ed. Craine. For a discussion of style of life enjoyed by American women of her rank see Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016).
208 Emma Hart 5. Samuel Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of its Growth (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); Jessica Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Ellen Hartigan O’Connor, The Ties that Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Benjamin Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 172–212; Sharon V. Salinger, ‘Spaces, Inside and Outside, in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26, no. 1 (1995): 1–31. 6. Nash, Urban Crucible; Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire in British North America (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2000). 7. For more on the Fort Wilson incident see John K. Alexander, ‘The Fort Wilson Incident of 1779: A Case Study of the Revolutionary Crowd’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 31 (October 1974): 589–612. 8. Peter Kalm, Travels into North America [1750], 1770, English edition, excerpts. Pehr (or Peter) Kalm was a Swedish naturalist, and apostle of Carl Linneaus, who travelled to Britain and North America to investigate the imperial project and to see what knowledge he could gather for improvement projects back home in Sweden. 9. Titan Leeds, ‘A Memorial to William Penn’, The Genuine Leeds Almanac for the Year of Christian Account 1730, publ. 1729, excerpts. 10. John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Mark Hanna, Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570– 1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Gary Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania 1681–1726 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 11. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992); Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 12. There is always the question, of course, of the purpose for which our diarists kept their record. For Marshall, the purpose of preserving the memory of the times and of his family’s actions seems to have been important. It is clear he was keen to leave behind an impression of himself for posterity but also for close relatives. Nelson did not reflect on his purpose at length, while Elaine Forman Crane, the editor of Elizabeth Drinker’s diary, explains that Drinker did not wish for her diary to be for public consumption. 13. On Philadelphia’s markets and commercial life see Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Emma Hart, Trading Spaces: The Colonial Marketplace and the Foundations of American Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). 14. Drinker diary, 30 May 1760. 15. Ibid., 22 July 1762. 16. Marshall Diary, 30 March 1775. 17. Nelson diary, 9 June 1781. 18. Ibid., 2 March 1780. 19. Marshall diary, 24 July 1775.
Daily Lives Dislocated? 209 0. Marshall diary, 9 May 1775. 2 21. Ibid., 29 July 1775—reading and writing. 15 May 1775 for visit to ‘the place’. 22. Nelson diary, Sunday 25 March 1781. 23. For communal singing with Aigers, see 3 April 1780 and 28 April 1781. 24. Despite her efforts, her son Henry did succumb to childhood illness in 1769. 25. Marshall diary, entries 1 February to 6 April 1777. 26. Nelson diary, Tuesday 15 August 1780. 27. Ibid., 10 February 1780. 28. Erica M. Charters, Eve Rosenhaft and Hannah Smith, eds., Civilians and War in Europe, 1618–1815 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). 29. Donald F. Johnson, ‘Ambiguous Allegiances: Urban Loyalties during the American Revolution’, Journal of American History 104, no. 3 (December 2017): 610–31; Lauren Duval, ‘Mastering Charleston: Property and Patriarchy in British-Occupied Charleston, 1780–82’, The William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 4 (2018): 589–622. 30. Drinker diary, 25 August 1780. 31. Marshall diary, 9 April 1775. 32. Drinker diary, 4 November 1777. 33. Ibid., 19 January 1778. 34. Ibid., 16 January 1778. 35. Ibid., 27 August 1780. 36. Ibid., 1 July 1781. 37. Marshall diary, 27 May 1780. Marshall returned to Philadelphia and left wife in Lancaster; 11 July he returned to her. 38. Ibid., 1 July 1777 and 14 August 1777. 39. Ibid., 5 January 1778. 40. Ibid. 41. Drinker diary, 27 June 1780. 42. Marshall diary, 11 December 1778. 43. As quoted in Judith van Buskirk, ‘They Didn’t Join the Band: Disaffected Women in Revolutionary Philadelphia’, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 62, no. 3 (1995): 306–29.
10 Everyday Life on the High Seas Routines, Restrictions and Recreation on East Indiamen Lisa Hellman
A journey with an East India Company ship had all the makings of a great adventure: it would sail for months, all the way from Europe to China, and sailors on board could go weeks without seeing land. At the same time, months sharing a vessel with a hundred others might sound claustrophobic: it was cramped, unhygienic and there are countless tales of the hard discipline and strict hierarchies on board. Both images are equally true. Eighteenth-century long-distance vessels could lie months at anchor in port, at times sail in close company with other ships and at times have nothing but the surface of the ocean in sight. The routine of everyday life played out in a dramatic oscillation between isolation and intercultural entanglements. However, close attention to these routines reveals how practices of eating, drinking, even socialising were reminiscent of those on land and created similar hierarchies.
A Journey With the Swedish East India Company Research on East India Companies has been part of the avant-garde for gendered and colonial aspects of maritime connections.1 However, maritime social history suffers from a colonial bias; while there are excellent studies of shipboard life, there are fewer studies of noncolonial East India companies and of life aboard noncolonial ships.2 In addition, modern studies commonly focus on the beginning and the end of the journey—on the home and the time abroad.3 Life on board is written off as a time of waiting, as empty as the sea it crosses. Christian Koninckx, who studied the Swedish East India Company, stated decades ago that the ‘maritime history of the companies has often been treated superficially, if not totally ignored’.4 Social history studies of East India Companies commonly make a distinction between home and away, making the in-between an exception to both. The core of this study is therefore a large noncolonial commercial maritime venture: the Swedish East India Company. In contrast to its contemporaries, such as the Dutch or British East India companies, it focused entirely on commercial trading: it had no permanent settlements,
Everyday Life on the High Seas 211 nor did it employ any military force. The Swedish company dispatched some 140 trade expeditions, the vast majority to China. In the following, we will follow its first three charters, that is, the first periods of state monopoly on the trade with the East Indies. This period, between 1732 and 1786, brought changes in the way that the trade was organised and in its profitability, but in other ways it was a time of astounding consistency: the vast majority of ships were of similar size, followed the same route and made the same stops at the same time. For these reasons, life on board did not differ significantly from one journey to the next. Rather, each phase of the journey had its own routine. Finding sources for events taken for granted constitutes a classic problem for historians, and this is no less true for life at sea: there are few sources written by mariners. The similarity of the journeys can be of help here, as they make it possible to combine log books, diaries, travelogues and letters from different journeys. These were penned by the men in charge, captains and supercargoes (the officers responsible for the trade) or by men asked to take notes, including the ship’s writer (the clerk serving on board), surgeon, and chaplain but also by cadets. Together, their sources paint a picture of life on board where some themes are particularly apparent: food and drink, daily work, health and discipline, sociability and domesticity. As much as they constitute is a story of long months in isolation, the shipboard routines illuminate intercultural interaction.
A Time and a Place for Food and Drink To understand daily life on board East India Company ships, the journey must be considered not only as a distance but also as a stretch of time. To travel from Europe to Canton, the main hub for European trade with China, took around eighteen months (550–560 days), if all went well. Between six and eight months were spent at sea and the rest in port. The temporal routines were explicit: the day was divided into watches, each of four hours. These watches were kept by all, including the captain, excepting only the supercargoes and their servants.5 The temperature shifted from a freezing Europe in January to the sweltering equator. As such, everyday life on board was a life of both sameness and dramatic shifts, of storms and calm routine. On board, social practices involving spatial relocation were met with difficulties, since one could not simply invite someone to a tea room, for example. Space was a critical issue because of the limited number of cabins on board and the importance assigned to them. Cabins were allotted in accordance to rank, and their placement and size reflected the class and status of the mariners. The chaplain, surgeon and officers all had a cabin, but the rest of the midship was open, housing supplies, animals and around a hundred sailors. That made the cabins a sensitive issue. Chaplain Pehr Osbeck grumbled so much that his patron Carl Linnaeus concluded that
212 Lisa Hellman ‘scholars always get a miserable cabin, the worst of the ship, where they lie as dogs and are made fools of’.6 To this came the sensory experience of the cramped living quarters: the midship smelled of moisture, mould, wet wool, unwashed male bodies, and hundreds of animals. Clothes and bedclothes were aired on deck, and sailors used rainwater to wash themselves, their clothes, and their bedding. In addition, the ship was dark. On account of the risk of fire, only the captain and the helmsmen were allowed to light candles in their cabins—and then only a single one, in a lantern.7 Social practices shaped the lived space of the ship, in relation to material limitations. A striking part of how the materiality of the ship changed over time was its pungent food pantry. When the ship Hoppet left Gothenburg in 1748, it brought with it 2 oxen, 1 cow, 22 pigs, and 96 heads of poultry (geese, ducks, turkeys and hens). Already in Cádiz, before leaving Europe, these were complemented by another cow, 2 calves, 16 sheep, 2 goats, 14 pigs, and 510 Spanish hens.8 With this came the fodder needed to feed them. This was in no way unique for the Hoppet. When the ship of Captain Johan Eric Morén left Canton, he counted 625 animals on board.9 Animals were brought on board in great numbers and were gradually eaten. Having left Canton with 625 animals, Captain Morén restocked another 561 animals at Java. Three months later, only 359 were left.10 On occasion, turtles were caught and kept alive for five to six weeks, ‘without other sustenance than being turned over daily, and splashed with sea water’.11 Being cargo vessels, the East Indiamen were comparatively large (see Figure 10.1), but this enforced cohabitation of
Figure 10.1 The Swedish East Indiaman ‘Finland’, on which Captain Ekeberg sailed. Source: Jacob Hägg 1921 after Ekeberg 1770, Gothenburg Maritime Museum.
Everyday Life on the High Seas 213 man and animals still brought trials. The smell, the crush and the access to food affected both the size and the conditions of the space where most men on board would sleep. This variety of livestock in some ways belied a monotonous diet. As Figure 10.2 shows for 1766, the menu on all Swedish company ships was set to a daily ration of peas and barley with oil or butter. In addition, the men ate dried meat on Sundays, Mondays and Thursdays, pork on Tuesdays
Figure 10.2 The menu of the Swedish East India Company in 1766. Source: Swedish Maritime Museum, SH 522.
214 Lisa Hellman and Wednesdays, and stockfish (dried fish) on Thursdays. While this menu was adapted as stocks were depleted and refilled, the basis stayed the same. The same consistency went for the drink rations: water when needed, and 4cl of schnapps daily.12 A common complaints on board was the food: on several trips, sailors protested that the bread was mouldy and full of worms and the peas rotten.13 The supercargoes and captain had a different routine: that of the first table. They kept a separate kitchen, eating what the officers chose and could gain access to and afterwards accounted for this food to the board of directors. Sometimes, other officers were invited to join this table; more often, they sat at the second table and followed their own set menu. Officers were not allotted any drink rations: they were supposed to buy and bring their own drink.14 The wine brought on board could also come in handy as gifts to foreign officers and officials.15 A logic of status was thus reflected in the meal routines, where there was a clear hierarchical ordering between the first and second table—and the rest.16 Drinking was often mentioned when it became excessive. The ship’s writer Israel Reinius wrote of a celebration where ‘among those who were drunk today was Anders Örn, who drunkenly fell from the forecastle to the deck, half dead’ or the seaman Gregorius Werner who ‘in the morning lay sick in a drunkard’s fever’.17 Chaplain Jacob Wallenberg time and time again mocked the sailors’ drinking, saying that any puking on board was caused by drink, not seasickness.18 Such episodes among the crew are presented as unavoidable. In contrast, supercargoes could complain how ‘unseemly’ it was when a higher officer drank too much.19 Drinking and eating were seen in terms of class, both regarding the supply and the manner of its consumption. This making of class took place in all East India Companies, and the distinct differences have been seen as either the basis for stability or for conflicts.20 Either way, routines must be seen as ongoing negotiations, not an unavoidable blueprint. Historian Margaret Creighton has explained that, while age and rank helped decide social position on board, the hierarchy was not set in stone.21 The chaplain was supposed to eat at the first table but could be excluded when there was a festivity, and surgeons and chaplains might lose the privilege of their cabins if the need arose.22 The intertwining of a ship’s temporal and spatial limitations is apparent in the supply of fresh water. Chaplain Osbeck said: The water, that had begun to rot before we had left Cádiz, was said to soon be good again; this had its natural causes, for one started to see small flies and sow bugs in the water, when it was sifted through a frieze canvas.23 On each supply stop, the crew was put to work restocking water, which was rationed and kept under close and concerned watch. For the officers,
Everyday Life on the High Seas 215 keeping track of the water level was a key routine, and, for the crew, resupplying it was part of the work at each stop.24 In 1784, the captain of the Gustaf Adolph proclaimed that ‘for the safety of the ship and with regards to the small supply of fresh water, he no longer dared to stand off the coast’.25 The need for access to water set limits for how far from supply stops they dared venture and set time limits for all legs of the journey: the rhythm of filling and tapping water was as natural to life on board as the rhythmic beating of the waves or the changing of the watch.
Working on Board and in Port The time at sea and experience of work on the way to and from China served as an education in different ways depending on the individuals and groups involved. Learning the ropes was to a large degree a matter of hands-on experience: at least three journeys as helmsman were required to become a captain, and the helmsmen were assigned the theoretical and practical education of the cadets. Ship’s surgeons were educated on board by first serving as assistants.26 To have personally worked your way overseas was the basis of your identity as a mariner, a point dramatically underlined by Captain Ekeberg in painting a storm he had braved (see Figure 10.1). In particular, the first long journey had a transformative potential, clearly symbolised in the ceremony of the ‘crossing of the line’. Those who passed the Equator for the first time were dunked in water and given punch. During the ceremony, money was raised for charity and for a party to be held upon arriving home.27 While depictions of festivities on board are rare, the crossing of the line was such an event that it was sometimes illustrated in engravings (Figure 10.3). Most importantly, this ritual signified becoming a sailor proper. The passage was supposedly a time of religious education as well: the chaplains were instructed that young men aboard were to be taught scripture.28 The execution of this ambition, however, was not very thorough, and there were ongoing complaints that sermons were postponed in favour of work on the ship.29 For most, such as the helmsmen, quartermasters and carpenters—and of course for the sailors themselves—the time on board was one of intense work. However, for some of the officers, the journey offered time and opportunity for self-education. There were ship’s writers, surgeons, captains, and supercargoes with ambitions to use the journey to China to establish themselves as scholars of natural history. Hanna Hodacs and Kenneth Nyberg liken the trips to an eighteenth-century graduate school.30 The on-board routine for prospective scholars included observing foreign lands and animal life, but also reading: the ship’s writer Christopher Braad listed almost eighty books that he read on the way to China in 1748.31 That routines shape not just the immediate space but also the world around us is apparent in the work of the mariners, responsible for
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Figure 10.3 The crossing of the line was a festive ritual. Source: Daniell 1810, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
navigating the ship. Their duties played out in a constant interaction with the sea, and their journals and log books contain sketches of coastlines, islands, and animals (Figure 10.4) as well as daily notations of fathom depth and potential natural obstacles; they listed sightings of birds and seaweed that helped to gauge the distance from land.32 These observations allowed a creation of space—places passed and distances c overed—even when no land was in sight. The sailing routines for Northern European sailors were tied consistently to the world under the surface.33 There is a persistent idea that the sea was a threatening, foreign world, where the ship was isolated.34 However, it is far from certain that the sea in the eighteenth century was seen as a void by the mariners; rather, their daily notations describe a sea crammed full of landmarks—dangers as well as possibilities. The East India Company ships are an example of work following a necessary routine, unchanging from year to year. Rather than finding their way through a great unknown, the ships followed set routes and a timetable that was adhered to almost to the exact day, year after year.35 Timing was crucial in order to catch the monsoon winds over the Indian Ocean; the ship Götheborg missed this window and spent months in Batavia awaiting favourable winds.36 Starting in Gothenburg, they went
Everyday Life on the High Seas 217
Figure 10.4 Sketches of the birds and coastlines helped mariners to navigate. Source: Carl Johan Gethe. ‘Dagbok, hållen på resan till Ostindien 1746–1749’, National Library of Sweden, 58.
south to Cádiz, sailed for the Cape and then stopped for provisions close to Java. They followed the same route back but stopped for provisions either on the islands of Ascencion, St. Helena, or both. As a result, ships from different companies often met on the way.37 The cadet Brelin got lost on Ascencion, and the ship left without him. Brelin wrote ‘In great confusion I stood at the beach and saw, not without tears and woe,
218 Lisa Hellman the ship disappearing out of sight’. He went to sleep, stating that ‘the worry I suffered that night, cannot be expressed’.38 However, a French ship approaching the island had already been contacted by the departing Swedes. They located Brelin the very next morning, and on board he found not only an order from his captain but also all his personal belongings. This was no deserted island, but a rest stop common to several nations. Neither the daily routine of sailing the ship nor the spatial creation of the sea route were national affairs. Rather, both built on intercultural practices. A recurring idea in art, geography, philosophy and even maritime history is that life led aboard was fundamentally different than on dry land.39 However, focusing on the daily routines of work aboard shows how closely intertwined ship life was with that of society more generally: educating yourself on board made you a scholar or mariner and measuring the sea and noting the shorelines meant locating yourself spatially. Shipboard routines shaped a class-based world, through practices based on the place they had left and the place they were headed to—but also through maritime practices on the way.
Life and Death on Board During the months on board, the composition of the crew and officers changed. The ship’s writer Braad wrote how At ten in the morning the accident happened, that Seaman Petter Krisman, who unbeknownst to us had joined the ship in Gothenburg, and was first hired in Cádiz, fell into the water, and was by the strong current soon dragged down under the surface.40 In one sentence, Braad summarises three ways in which the group on board changed: through stowaways, through hiring along the way, and through accidents and deaths. Disease and death were common among officers as well as the crew.41 The ship’s surgeon Carl Fredrik Adler filled column after column in his journal: the crew had upset stomachs, suffered from sunstroke, tripped, crushed their testicles, and caught intestinal worms.42 Sometimes the carnage was extreme. In 1765, the ship Finland (Figure 10.1) lost 62 of its 150 men.43 While it was more dangerous to go to sea than to stay on land, with a 12 per cent overall mortality rate, those employed by the Swedish company had slightly better conditions than those on other companies—perhaps because most only went to Canton and back.44 That said, death was a natural part of life on board. To compensate for these losses, men were hired along the way, reflecting the mobility of the maritime labour market.45 The chaplain Wallenberg wrote, with his usual wry tone, that ‘a sea plague wiped out almost half the crew in a few weeks, and forced the concerned to, in Cádiz,
Everyday Life on the High Seas 219 scrape together dregs in all sorts of colours: white, black and yellow’.46 From his journeys in the 1760s, the chaplain David Pontin wrote that ‘those who saw our looks or heard our mix of speech thought us to be of all possible nations, for I had a company speaking fourteen different tongues’.47 The constant dearth of able men led to an international tug-of-war in the ports. Captain Carl Rappe described how, when hiring a cooper, he had to ‘promise him the same pay that he had from the English’.48 In addition, some ships made room for passengers. These were often Spanish or French, but there is a case of a Chinese man who travelled all the way to Sweden.49 On board, then, there was inevitable intercultural mingling. Upon departure, most of the crew was from the Swedish-Finnish realm. However, as the Swedish company lacked experienced officers, these were recruited abroad. Most were Scottish, but others were French, German, Flemish, or Italian; the ship’s surgeons could be recruited from Scotland or the German states.50 The ship’s writer Reinius joked about the confusion caused by cultural and maritime differences, like when a Dutch helmsman wanted to go east of a certain set of cliffs, while the British helmsman demanded to go to the west.51 The ship was a multicultural sphere from the onset of the trip. On the first Swedish expedition, the Swedish captain Georg Trolle and Scottish first supercargo Colin Campbell were in constant conflict and recurrently used arguments of nationality to question the other’s loyalty to the company. Trolle claimed that all Scotsmen were villains, and Campbell accused the captain of being Danish. When Trolle complained about Campbell’s poor understanding of Swedish, the Scot answered that it would be ‘ludicrous’ to expect him— or others—to learn it.52 The sources tend to highlight times of confusion and conflict; in general, however, the number of languages and origins on board seem not to have disrupted daily life—routines included translation and intercultural adaptation. Naturally, conflicts and disturbances were to be expected, and theft, cursing, drunken insults, arguments and brawls were commonplace occurrences.53 These conflicts included officers. On the expedition of Ulrica Eleonora from 1733 to 1734, tensions ran so high between the supercargoes that the captain eventually arrested one of them and locked him in a cabin, where he ‘screamed and swore for days’.54 Just as on land, life on board depended on norms of self-discipline and public opinion, in addition to formal laws. However, shipboard behaviour was even more regulated and had a court at the ready: on board, the captain served as judge. Punishments were in theory brutal, but the usual sanction was loss of alcohol rations; corporeal punishment was relatively unusual, as it was rarely deemed worthwhile to make someone unfit for work.55 Sometimes, there was an even unwillingness to reach judgment. In 1745, a man stood accused of theft, but the ship’s court suggested putting him in custody and bringing him home, claiming that they might not have understood
220 Lisa Hellman the law.56 On other occasions, the unwillingness to hold court on board reflected the nature of the crime. Sexual relations between the men on board company ships were rarely mentioned, presumably because such acts carried the death penalty. In one case, the supercargo Charles Morford was, during a journey to China 1742, found ‘committing sodomy’ with the seaman Johan Hellman. He died before the trial, and the ship’s official journal mentions nothing of the incident. In another, a supercargo caught with a cabin boy was allowed to escape discretely before the ship arrived home.57 Recent discussions in carceral geography, a field focusing on the spatial conditions of freedom, have focused on whether a ship is inherently and necessarily a site of coercion.58 Again, by focusing on daily life, it is possible to see a balance between the sailors’ living conditions, the brawls and the punishments meted out, the freedom and open skies, and the hierarchies of power. Daily life on a ship could be dangerous and hard, but that was also the case on land. Moreover, the routines could be flexible: even something as formalised as justice on board could be adapted to the needs of the ship.
Sociability at Sea At a time easily imagined as isolated, during long-distance crossings, the ships were often in company. In the eighteenth century, maritime trade routes became contested, and the sea became a space of power in and of itself.59 In addition, several company ships were assailed by privateers, pirates and even by other East India companies.60 Swedish mercantile vessels were already sailing in convoy in the seventeenth century, but in 1724 a more formal economic and administrative structure was established to protect ships farther abroad.61 In 1786, the supercargo Olof Lindahl wrote in a letter that ‘We are four ships in company, the Swedish and [that of] Captain Rogers and Robinson’.62 In the same year, the ship’s writer Braad found it noteworthy when the ‘ship Freden, that has been accompanying us, swerved, so that we for two days lost sight of her’.63 In the shadow of this larger power dynamic, social practices developed. The supercargo Campbell wrote that the Dutch that they sailed with in convoy ‘would oblige us every day to dine & pass the day with them’.64 The social routines established on board thus shifted depending on the accompanying ships and would change again when the ships parted ways. Encounters with other ships were also an important communication channel, where news from Europe and Asia was received and sent, verbally or in letters.65 The practice of sharing news was crucial for those on board: they could hear of wars breaking out but also send personal letters with news back home. Attention to this communication routine demonstrates how daily life fits in large-scale historical change. As maritime long-distance trade increased, the ships’ routine letter exchanges shaped
Everyday Life on the High Seas 221 intercultural communication, not just as transport vessels but as part of a mobile and global information network.66 Salutes were also an important part of communication and sociability. The cannons of Swedish company ships were rarely used for battle but often for sending messages across distance. When the ships Adolph Fredric and Calmar wanted to confer with each other, they fired ‘three loose shots after one another’.67 Salutes were used to greet other ships or to reciprocate greetings, at sea, in port, and when passing fortifications.68 The result was a great ruckus. In 1748, a Swedish ship was hailed by a Dutch ship with eight shots and ‘responded with four, and soon we were saluted with eight [shots] by an approaching Swede, who claimed to be from Västervik, so we thanked with the same number of shots, and he thanked us back with four shots back’.69 Sociability at sea thus included politeness from afar, but salutes were also used in other ways. When Supercargo Campbell was invited to dine at a Dutch ship, the Swedish king, the estates general and the health of the Dutch governor were all saluted with thirteen shots each. Campbell noted that the Dutch were equally keen on drinks and salutes.70 In addition, salutes marked the status of those embarking or disembarking. In Cádiz, the Swedish consul and the supercargoes were saluted with sixteen shots when coming aboard and the same number when they disembarked two hours later.71 Salutes worked as a symbol for a change of space across national boundaries, on board as well as in port; a salute marked the conjoint making of space and status. They were both an established part of maritime ritual and punctuated practices of sociability that perhaps formed a welcome change from familiar routines. When the ships arrived in harbour, new questions arose. Most of the conflicts and opportunities of harbour life revolved around who might and might not leave ship. As seen in Figure 10.5, ports could be crowded. In part because of the potential for international interaction with other crews and those from the port, instructions from the board of directors from 1766 stated that when the ship was at an anchorage they should ‘keep the crew on board, and in all ways prevent them from going on land or on board foreign ships’.72 When stopping in Cádiz in 1732, Supercargo Campbell became furious at his captain for letting some of the crew leave for shore for a few hours.73 Even though the officers tried to confine the crew to the ship, there were exceptions: they had the right to short periods of leave and could also be needed for work on land, such as loading water or stowing goods.74 However, to illicitly leave the ship was punished with beatings and lost pay.75 The reason for this restriction was threefold: first, sailors were needed for repair work or loading goods. This repair work was often international, as ships from different nations could share supplies or lend crew members for repairs.76 Second, there was a worry that sailors would jump ship; without sufficient personnel, to travel on could be dangerous or, if
Source: Carl Gustav Ekeberg, ‘Capitaine Carl Gustav Ekebergs ostindiska resa’, Umeå University Library, 119.
Figure 10.5 Ships of many nations would gather at the anchorage of Whampoa, here in 1770.
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Everyday Life on the High Seas 223 enough men were lost, nigh impossible. The Swedish journals contain colourful descriptions of hunting down escaped sailors, but the problem was common to all companies.77 Finally, it was feared that the sailors would end up in a brawl. Fights often broke out in port, either between groups of sailors or between sailors and the local population.78 The ship’s writer, Braad, wrote from Cádiz that the ‘Same evening, 36 of our men were arrested for a brawl with French seamen’.79 The officers feared that this would cause disturbances in trade, but there was also a larger context to this: the conscious restriction of lower-class men—and the construction of their masculinity as one of uncontrollable violence—was integral to the view of sailors throughout Europe.80 The officers felt the crew were likely to transgress, whereas they, in contrast, could behave themselves in international contacts. The men in a middling position, such as ship’s writers, surgeons and chaplains, were sometimes allowed to leave ship and sometimes not; they were sometimes invited to dinners and balls but not always. The chaplain Olof Torén observed upon leaving Surat that, after five and half months, he had visited land on only twenty-three days. Such, he noted placidly, was a sailor’s life.81 The repair work meant a shift in the work routine, but the restrictions on mobility meant that other, most, daily routines stayed the same. For the highest officers on board, the routine shifted more upon arrival in port. Supercargoes went on visits or gave dinners on board for local governors, consuls or supercargoes and captains from other ships and companies; the ship space was consistently formed by intercultural meetings.82 Even scholars who stress the isolated nature of early modern ships argue that the men on board were consistently changed and affected by such meetings.83 In Cádiz, the ship’s writer, Braad, met a distant relative who was a captain of a Dutch ship and was subsequently treated to dinner.84 Men in the East India companies could shift homeland and employer, and any place where they congregated was suitable for networking. This is clear in the case of Braad, but even more so for men in the Scottish diaspora.85 On the evening of 8 September 1732, the first Swedish East India Company ship arrived to Canton. The Scottish supercargoes ‘went along . . . to see if we could light on any of the English of our Acquaintance’.86 They soon met some acquaintances and exchanged news of mutual friends—at ten at night on their very first day in a Chinese harbour. When a ship had to spend the winter of 1746 on Mauritius, the ship’s writer Reinius described a vivid social life. A typical entry reads: ‘For dinner, a bunch of French Captains arrived, who eventually amused themselves with dance, music and carousing’.87 On the ships of other companies, there could also be women on board. Captain Ekeberg noted that ‘European ladies from Bengal, Batavia and other places, sometimes accompany their husbands here [to China]’.88 On another occasion, the natural historian, Anders Sparrman, tells of a case when a woman had
224 Lisa Hellman been sent to marry a governor in the East Indies. On the journey there, she had unfortunately been impregnated by the ship’s captain.89 As with mobility between ship and land, interaction with women was primarily for officers. Regular encounters with ladies of other nations took place on the way to and from China. The East Indiamen usually stopped at the Cape, a large hub for colonial and noncolonial networks.90 There, the supercargo Michael Grubb took part in ‘two capital balls where we danced with vigour until four or five in the morning’. Grubb continues that ‘I assure you that the girls here can dance contra dances’.91 Given the formalised nature of European polite sociability, balls, visits, and dinners were of paramount importance as occasions to network and to interact politely with women—especially for aspiring social climbers such as the officers on board the East Indiamen.92 Stops in port included new gendered routines. Even before crossing the North Sea, the chaplain Wallenberg described how prostitutes had hidden themselves on board but that ‘Our captain found them not necessary to the service of the company, and therefore had them brought to land in the yawl, to the sorrow of many hearts’.93 The journals of ship’s surgeons detail gruesome symptoms of venereal diseases, including the ‘membrum virile’ of cadet Olof Flygare, ‘which was somewhat swollen and crocked, with a flow of gonorrhoea’. When asked where he contracted the disease, the cadet answered that he ‘had been whoremongering . . . in several places, whenever occasion arose’.94 Visiting prostitutes was a given part of port visits, however short, but the behaviour has primarily been connected with the crew.95 This incident thus challenges the often binary vision of polite sociability focused on visits, balls, and coffee houses, and maritime and port life, including brawls, visits to prostitutes, and exchanges of male and female manual labour.96 Flygare’s experiences show how an individual crossed different social worlds through their everyday social practice.
Domesticity on Board There was ongoing contact with women through social interaction and prostitution, but in accounts of the journeys, the absence of women also plays an important role. Chaplain Wallenberg wrote: ‘Someone who sees an East India traveller the first fourteen days after the arrival home, might easily consider them to be unruly horn-dogs’.97 Analyses of such quotes have helped create the idea of the long-distance of the time on board long-distance vessels as one of gendered isolation, tying it to the sexualised trope of the sailor, starved for female company.98 Several supercargoes mention the lack of women and pining for their sweethearts back home; the chaplain Wallenberg even wrote parodies of the love letters that sailors sent home.99 The literary scholar SvenErik Rose stresses this longing for women, the homeland and the house
Everyday Life on the High Seas 225 in the East India Company narratives. To Rose, ‘the journey abroad is resolutely oriented toward home, embodied in Swedish womanhood’.100 To stress this longing was key in demonstrating sensibility and in constructing domesticity—not only in the upper classes.101 Historian Joanne Begiato argues that, at this time, a sailor’s longing showed sensibility as well as patriotism; the home was a safe haven for men and physical distance to it heavily invested with meaning.102 This can be compared to other tropes that connect ideas of home, masculinity and missing women, such as the sailor lamenting his absent home in Portuguese fado.103 However, this emotional expression is better understood as a rhetorical device of sensibility, intended more to construct masculinity and domesticity than as a reflection of actual absence. Conventional domesticity on dry land was the aim for most. Jean Abraham Grill was told by his uncle that ‘two journeys as a supercargo is five years’ loss of time, and then you should earn enough to settle in your fatherland’.104 In Sweden, as elsewhere in Europe, the home was consistently and irrevocably tied to the presence of women, primarily the wife.105 The historian Margaret Marsh has termed this gender norm a ‘masculine domesticity’.106 Of the 127 men that sailed to China on Lovisa Ulrika in 1748, only 39 were already married, but for many in the company, the time in China led to marriage.107 When arriving home, the supercargo Grubb married the woman he had been engaged to for nine years, during his entire China career.108 Marriage was necessary to become the head of a household and to achieve good standing, and the company offered a chance to procure the social, cultural and economic capital to do so. Ships sailing the long distance to China accommodated their crew for months, sometimes years. Daily life on board therefore shows two parallel ideas: longing for a distant home but also a mobile and temporary domesticity. Chaplain Wallenberg wrote that: Sailors are migratory birds, like the water they sail, they are in constant motion. . . . The world is his native land, the atmosphere his dwelling, the sky his ceiling, and the kingdom of fishes his pasture. Without a home, he is at home everywhere.109 The creation of home abroad in the eighteenth century has been primarily tied to the process of imperialism: historian Judith Walsh even calls this evolving transnational discourse a ‘global domesticity’.110 It might be fruitful to further consider the roles of mariners in such a context. With their shifts between mobility and immobility throughout the journey, ongoing social contacts and creations of social difference, they might help question the notion of a journey. The rhythm of life when sailing to and from Asian ports included both breaks and continuity in routines. Was a stop at port—even if it lasted for months—perceived as the end of a journey, a break, or was it considered an integral part of everyday life on board?
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Conclusion The case of Swedish East India Company ships helps illuminate routines of life on board, as well as the effects of these routines. Just as for farm labour, some routines lasted months and shifted with the phases of the journey or the season. Such steady work practices helped educate sailors, and ceremonies marking progress on the journey strengthened their identity as sailors. Other routines, such as the temporal division of the day, stayed the same. For mariners, this work included getting to know the sea space and identifying its landmarks. Their daily work continuously constructed their view of the vast expanse of sea around them and gave it structure. To them, work shaped the sea as a space in and of itself. More mundane but equally profound, it was through daily practices—in access to and choice of food, drink and accommodation, for example— that class was created and recreated. This process was not a set pattern but rather an ongoing negotiation, one that the material confines of the ship made particularly clear. Of particular importance in this respect was the restriction of movement. To socialise and network across gender and national boundaries were aspirations shared by officers and crew alike, but to be allowed to disembark or to take part in intercultural dinners was an efficient maker of difference. There were constant attempts to spatially restrict the crew, but, for officers, both life at sea and at ports offered chances to practice international sociability with women as well as with men. Ships continuously sailed with, cooperated, got news from, and interacted socially with ships from other nations, and the crew could be complemented by hiring men from abroad. If anything, shipboard routines blurred the borders of interaction between nations, while sharpening those between classes through negotiations of which social practices would be available to which class. Ships have been considered a universe in themselves or else as a transport to a distant place. However, attention to daily practices on board long-distance trading vessels might help dissolve completely the usual binary of home and abroad. Seeing shipboard life as part of broader society also makes it possible to consider mobility and domesticity in relation to each other and create a richer view of everyday life.
Notes 1. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, and Angela Woollacott, eds., Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700—Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 2. N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Fontana, 1988); Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, Iron Men,
Everyday Life on the High Seas 227 Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 3. See Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 4. Christian Koninckx, The First and Second Charters of the Swedish East India Company (1731–1766): A Contribution to the Maritime, Economic and Social History of North-Western Europe in Its Relations with the Far East (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1980), 111. 5. Sven T. Kjellberg, Svenska ostindiska compagnierna 1731–1813: kryddor, te, porslin, siden (Malmö: Allhem, 1974), 191. 6. Ibid. 282. This and all following quotes translated by the author. 7. Kjellberg, Svenska ostindiska compagnierna, 192. 8. Christopher Henric Braad, ‘Skeppet Hoppet’, X 390, Manuscripts, Uppsala University Library, 55. 9. Eric Morén, ‘Skeppsjournal förd ombord å Ost Comps Skepp Freden Kapt. Morén under 1746–1747 års expedition’, M 286, Manuscripts, National Library of Sweden [not paginated], 1/2. 10. Ibid., 19/3, 23/5. 11. Carl Gustav Ekeberg, Capitaine Carl Gustav Ekebergs ostindiska resa åren 1770 och 1771: beskrefven uti bref til Kongl. Svenska vet. academiens secreterare (Stockholm: Rediviva, 1970), 165. 12. ‘Spisningsordning gällande för ostindiska kompaniets fartyg’, 1766, SH 522, The Maritime Museum, Stockholm. 13. Kjellberg, Svenska ostindiska compagnierna, 198. 14. Ibid., 196. 15. Johan Brelin, En äfventyrlig resa til och ifrån Ost-Indien, Södra America och en del af Europa åren 1755, 56 och 57 (Stockholm: Rediviva, 1973), 58. 16. Koninckx, The Swedish East India Company, 320–77. 17. Israel Reinius, Journal hållen på resan till Canton i China . . . ifrån dess begynnelse åhr 1745 till dess slut åhr 1748 (Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland, 1939), 67; Paul Hallberg and Bertil S. Olsson, eds., En ostindiefarande fältskärs berättelse: Carl Fredrik Adlers journal från skeppet Prins Carl 1753– 1756 (Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps- och Vitterhets-samhället, 2013), 50. 18. Jacob Wallenberg, Min son på galejan: nyutgåva med moderniserad stavning (Stockholm: Prisma, 1967), 16. 19. Colin Campbell, A Passage to China: Colin Campbell’s Diary of the First Swedish East India Company Expedition to Canton, 1732–1733 (Göteborg: Kungl. Vetenskaps- och vitterhets-samhället, 1996), 44. 20. Rodger, The Wooden World, 16; Karel Degryse and Christian Koninckx, ‘Sociale En Sexuele Spanningen Aan Boord van de Oostendse OostIndiëvaarders (1715–1734)’, in Bijdragen Tot de Internationale Maritieme Geschiedenis (Brussel: Koninklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, 1988), 67–79. 21. Creighton and Norling, Iron Men, Wooden Women, 118–30. 22. Hallberg and Olsson, eds., En ostindiefarande fältskär, 37; Agneta Hermansson, ‘Magnus Giesko Wallerius och andra skeppspredikanter’, in Ostindiska Compagniet: affärer och föremål, ed. Kristina Söderpalm (Göteborg: Göteborgs stadsmuseum, 2000), 151. 23. Pehr Osbeck, Dagbok öfver en ostindisk resa åren 1750, 1751, 1752 (Stockholm: Rediviva, 1969), 69. 24. Morén, ‘Skeppsjournal’, 12/3, 16/3, 19/3, 1/4. 25. Kjellberg, Svenska ostindiska compagnierna, 208. 26. Ibid., 193–94; Koninckx, The Swedish East India Company, 308–90; Hallberg and Olsson, eds., En ostindiefarande fältskär, 88.
228 Lisa Hellman 27. Christopher Henric Braad, ‘Berättelse om resan med skeppet Hoppet under Capitaine Fr. Pettersons commando 1748–1749’, X 389, Manuscripts, Uppsala University Library, 29; Reinius, Resan till Canton, 61; Osbeck, Ostindisk resa, 74; Erik von Stockenström, ‘Dagboksanteckningar under en resa till Ostindien 1767–1769’, M 270, Manuscripts, National Library of Sweden, 16–17. 28. Per Rhedin, Göteborgs stifts skepspredikanter vid Svenska ostindiska compagniet 1732–1805 (Göteborg: Typografia Olsén, 2002), 7. 29. Reinius, Resan till Canton, 56. 30. Hanna Hodacs and Kenneth Nyberg, Naturalhistoria på resande fot: om att forska, undervisa och göra karriär i 1700-talets Sverige (Stockholm: Nordic Academic Press, 2007), 44, 73, 172. 31. Christopher Henric Braad, ‘Förteckning på Böcker som blefvet genomläste under resan med Skeppet Hoppet till China, åren 1748 och 49’, 1985:3, Linköping Diocesan Library. 32. Carl Johan Gethe, ‘Dagbok hållen på resan till ost indien 1746–1749’, M 280, Manuscripts, National Library of Sweden; Ekeberg, Ostindiska resa, 3, 26, 36, 69; Morén, ‘Skeppsjournal’, 30/1–5/2, 25/2, 7–13/5, 23/5; Reinius, Resan till Canton, 2–7, 54, 73, 152–53, 278–79; Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 31, 41. 33. Philip Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 52–74; Koninckx, The Swedish East India Company, 119. 34. Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840 (Oxford: Polity Press, 1994), 2–16, 19–28. 35. Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 33. 36. Koninckx, The Swedish East India Company, 123. 37. Reinius, Resan till Canton, 142–43; Ekeberg, Ostindiska resa, 160–62. 38. Brelin, En äfventyrlig resa, 69–76. 39. See Michel Foucault, ‘Des espaces autres. Hétérotopies’, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–49; H. V. Bowen and Elizabeth Mancke, eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c.1550– 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, 35. 40. Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 39. 41. Ibid., 32; Morén, ‘Skeppsjournal’, 16/3–27/5. 42. Hallberg and Olsson, eds., En ostindiefarande fältskär, 47, 104. 43. Hermansson, ‘Wallerius och andra skeppspredikanter’, 151. 44. Kristina Söderpalm, ‘Svenska ostindiska kompaniet 1731–1813. En översikt’, in Ostindiska Compagniet: affärer och föremål, ed. Kristina Söderpalm (Göteborg: Göteborgs stadsmuseum, 2000), 19. 45. Koninckx, The Swedish East India Company, 334–36. 46. Wallenberg, Min son på galejan, 84. 47. David Pontin, ‘Ostindienresorna 1760–1766’, SBL B 236, Östergötlands arkivförbund, Linköping Diocesan Library. 48. Carl Rappe, ‘Dagbok för Skeppet Rycksens Ständer På Resa till Surat och Canton 1760–1762’, M 288, Manuscript, National Library of Sweden, 27. 49. Koninckx, The Swedish East India Company, 107; see Osbeck, Ostindisk resa, 113; ‘Brev till Erik Stockenström från Olof Lindahl 27/1 1786’, Is 46, Bref och handlingar rörande Erik von Stockenström, Manuscripts, National Library of Sweden. 50. Kjellberg, Svenska ostindiska compagnierna, 22; Koninckx, The Swedish East India Company, 334–36; Bertil S. Olsson, Swenska Ost-Indiska Compagniets fältskärer (Göteborg: Landsarkivet i Göteborg, 2012), 12.
Everyday Life on the High Seas 229 1. Reinius, Resan till Canton, 136. 5 52. Campbell, Passage to China, 61, 222–26. 53. Reinius, Resan till Canton, 37, 51, 57–58, 68–69, 80, 101–17, 175; von Stockenström, ‘resa till Ostindien’, 23. 54. Kjellberg, Svenska ostindiska compagnierna, 51. 55. Koninckx, The Swedish East India Company, 366. 56. Reinius, Resan till Canton, 101–2. 57. Jan Parmentier and Sander Spanoghe, Orbis in orbem: liber amicorum John Everaert (Gent: Academia Press, 2001), 178–79; Per Forsberg, Lars Melchior, and Ulf Andersson, Ostindiefararen Götheborg 1738–1745: resorna för Ostindiska kompaniet, besättningarna, haveriet (Göteborg: Riksarkivet Landsarkivet i Göteborg, 2014), 36; see Degryse and Koninckx, ‘Sociale En Sexuele Spanningen’. 58. Elodie Duché, ‘Captives in Plantations: British Prisoners of War and Visions of Slavery in Napoleonic France and Mauritius’, French History and Civilization 7 (2017): 108–24. 59. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean, 16–17, 38. 60. Fredric Christian Sternleuw, ‘Sjöresor under 40 år’, IS 40, Manuscripts, National Library of Sweden, 10; Ekeberg, Ostindiska resa, 30; Olof Torén, En ostindisk resa (Stockholm: Tiden, 1961), 66–67; Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 3. 61. Leos Müller, Consuls, Corsairs, and Commerce: The Swedish Consular Service and Long-Distance Shipping, 1720–1815 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2004), 65–67. 62. ‘Brev till Erik Stockenström från Olof Lindahl 27/1 1786’. 63. Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 42. 64. Campbell, Passage to China, 189. 65. See for example ‘Brev till Erik Stockenström från Olof Lindahl 27/1 1786’; Morén, ‘Skeppsjournal’, 24/8; Paul A. Van Dyke and Cynthia Viallé, eds., The Canton-Macao Dagregisters, 1762 (Macau: Instituto Cultural do Governo da R.A.E. de Macau, 2006), 73–78. 66. Kären Wigen, ‘Introduction’, in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 1–3. 67. Reinius, Resan till Canton, 18–19. 68. Von Stockenström, ‘resa till Ostindien’, 5, 40. 69. Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 55. 70. Campbell, Passage to China, 188–89. 71. Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 55. 72. Forsberg et al., Ostindiefararen Götheborg, 24. 73. Campbell, Passage to China, 19. 74. Morén, ‘Skeppsjournal’, 14–16/3. 75. Reinius, Resan till Canton, 191. 76. See Osbeck, Ostindisk resa, 58; Anders Sparrman, Resa till Goda Hoppsudden, södra pol-kretsen och omkring jordklotet, samt till hottentott- och caffer-landen, åren 1772–76 (Stockholm, 1783), 43; Paul A. Van Dyke and Cynthia Viallé, eds., The Canton-Macao Dagregisters, 1763 (Macau: Instituto Cultural do Governo da R.A.E. de Macau, 2008), 164. 77. Reinius, Resan till Canton, 16; Sternleuw, ‘Sjöresor’, Note 1; Paul A. Van Dyke and Cynthia Viallé, eds., The Canton-Macao Dagregisters, 1764 (Macau: Instituto Cultural do Governo da R.A.E. de Macau, 2009), 74. 78. Rappe, ‘Skeppet Rycksens Ständer’, 24; Van Dyke and Viallé, The CantonMacao Dagregisters, 1763, 108. 79. Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 37.
230 Lisa Hellman 80. Joanne Begiato, ‘Tears and the Manly Sailor in England, C. 1760–1860’, Journal for Maritime Research 17, no. 2 (2015): 117–33. 81. Torén, Ostindisk resa, 20, 69. 82. Christopher Tärnström, Christopher Tärnströms journal: en resa mellan Europa och Sydostasien år 1746 (London: Whitby, 2005), 39–40; Van Dyke and Viallé, The Canton-Macao Dagregisters, 1762, 77; Morén, ‘Skeppsjournal’, 9/6; Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 23, 37, 135. 83. Vincent V. Patarino, ‘The Religious Shipboard Culture of Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century English Sailors’, in The Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649, ed. Cheryl A. Fury (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 150. 84. Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 37. 85. See Angela McCarthy, A Global Clan: Scottish Migrant Networks and Identity Since the Eighteenth Century (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006). 86. Campbell, Passage to China, 88–89. 87. Reinius, Resan till Canton, 41, 97–117. 88. Ekeberg, Ostindiska resa, 78. 89. Sparrman, Resa till Goda Hopps-udden, 30. 90. Kerry Ward, ‘ “Taverns of the Seas?” The Cape of Good Hope as an Oceanic Crossroads during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 134–47. 91. ‘Brev till Jean Abraham Grill från Michael Grubb 5/5 1764’, Letter Collection, the Godegård archive, Nordic Museum Archive. 92. Examples include Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2001). 93. Wallenberg, Min son på galejan, 11. 94. Hallberg and Olsson, eds., En ostindiefarande fältskär, 134–35. 95. See also Braad, ‘Resan med skeppet Hoppet’, 21. 96. See Jo Stanley, ‘And after the Cross-Dressed Cabin Boys and Whaling Wives? Possible Futures for Women’s Maritime Historiography’, Journal of Transport History 23, no. 1 (2002): 9–22. 97. Wallenberg, Min son på galejan, 46. 98. Begiato, ‘Tears and the Manly Sailor’; Sven-Erik Rose, ‘The Funny Business of the Swedish East India Company: Gender and Imperial Joke-Work in Jacob Wallenberg’s Travel Writing’, Eighteenth-Century Studies Berkeley, no. 33 (1999–2000). 99. Wallenberg, Min son på galejan, 206–7. 100. Rose, ‘Funny Business’, 223. 101. Amy Kaplan, ‘Manifest Domesticity’, American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 581–606; Karen Harvey, ‘Men Making Home: Masculinity and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Gender & History 21, no. 3 (2009). 102. Begiato, ‘Tears and the Manly Sailor’, 122. 103. Kimberly DaCosta Holton, ‘Fado Historiography: Old Myths and New Frontiers’, Portuguese Cultural Studies, no. 0 (2006). 104. Quoted in Leos Müller, ‘Mellan Kanton och Göteborg: Jean Abraham Grill, en superkargörs karriär’, in Historiska etyder, ed. Janne Backlund et al. (Uppsala: Historiska institutionen, Uppsala University, 1997), 151. 105. Jonas Liliequist, ‘Ära, dygd och manlighet. Strategier för social prestige i 1600- och 1700-talets Sverige’, Lychnos (2009): 117–47; Andreas Marklund, I hans hus: svensk manlighet i historisk belysning (Umeå: Boréa, 2004); see also Harvey, ‘Men Making Home’, 520–40.
Everyday Life on the High Seas 231 106. Margaret Marsh, ‘Suburban Men and Masculine Domesticity, 1870–1915’, American Quarterly 40, no. 2 (1988). 107. ‘Skeppsrulla för Lovisa Ulrika’, A0406/F III/1, Öijareds Säteri, the Regional State Archive in Gothenburg; for marriages, see ‘Christopher Henric Braad’, in Svenskt biografiskt lexikon V (1925): 624; ‘Jean Abraham Grill’, in Svenskt biografiskt lexikon XVII (1967): 285; Sternleuw, ‘Sjöresor under 40’, note 1. 108. ‘Brev till Jean Abraham Grill från Michael Grubb 14/1 1766’, Letter Collection, the Godegård archive, Nordic Museum Archive. 109. Wallenberg, Min son på galejan, 156. 110. Judith Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned When Men Gave Them Advice (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004), 11–15; David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Hall and Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire.
Conclusion Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart
At the start of this exploration of daily lives and daily routines across different parts of the eighteenth-century world, we highlighted three ways in which micro-historical approaches link into people’s daily routines: the construction of identity; the connection between the micro and broader social practices and relationships; and the spatiality of daily routines. Drawing on the arguments made in individual chapters, we can now reflect on how they might revise the ways in which we view the broad significance of everyday routines and practices. Whether we see it as performance or performative, each of the chapters shows how identity was intimately shaped by everyday activities but in ways that were complex and contingent. The intricacies and busyness of everyday life meant that people were constantly constructing and reconstructing multiple and overlapping identities. To take just two examples: Amaro shows how Clara Whitney’s identities as a woman, a member of the social elite, white, foreign, pious, and even prudish were all constructed through the ways in which she engaged—or purposely failed to engage— with local people, customs, spaces, and places. At times, she seems to have been consciously acting out a preconceived notion of self, as when she distanced herself from the crude behaviour in ‘half-naked’ men in teahouses; on other occasions, self was built through daily routines, for example, when entertaining guests at home. Similarly, Anders Kihlberg built his status as a merchant and councilman through his routine activities in Stockholm and Arboga; his identity as husband and father were accrued through daily life in and around the home. As Andersson demonstrates, all these different aspects of self were further layered by his identity as honourable, trustworthy, loyal, and companionable—characteristics that were both deliberately nurtured and the natural outcome of his daily interaction with fellow citizens, friends, and family. Both Whitney and Kihlberg were able to shape their routines and their identities. The agency of workers and servants is less immediately apparent but still important. Hellman shows how sailors were not simply defined by their occupation and labour but by their skills and experience. Similarly, as an undergardener, Thomas Challis, had much of his
Conclusion 233 daily life dictated by his employer and by the passing seasons, but he could also carve out another identity through his daily journal writing, as Brown and Stobart make clear. More profoundly, perhaps, Ilmakunnas argues persuasively that we need to reconsider the nature of work and thus how it plays into an individual’s self-identity. What appear to be leisure activities often constituted work and certainly helped to build socially connected identities—something that is apparent in the writing undertaken by Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna and in the ‘business lunches’ at the Åbo/Turku Assembly House enjoyed by Carl Axel Gottlund (see the chapter by Artukka). Occupational labels only tell us part of the story. Individual agency also allowed people to adapt to changing circumstances, remoulding their practices and identities as conditions demanded or allowed. Artukka demonstrates this in the use made of the new facilities offered by the Assembly House, with people reorienting their leisure activities around the various activities on offer; Hart shows how various Philadelphians were able to adapt their routines around shifting political realities of revolutionary America, and Hellman demonstrates the ways in which the daily practices of sailors and officers should shift dramatically when ships arrived at port or encountered other vessels. What is equally apparent from many of the contributions to this volume is that daily routines were often internalised. Few people took the time or trouble to record their day-to-day lives, and fewer still reflected on them in any meaningful way. This is most apparent in the contrasting emphasis put on everyday life in Edo by those writing as long-term residents and those who were visiting the city from overseas—as Amaro observes, Edo diarists rarely even mentioned the mundane nature of street life that formed a backdrop to their own lives. Yet the diarists drawn on by Hart, Artukka, Hellman, Andersson, and Brown and Stobart showed a similar lack of reflexivity in recording their daily lives. This makes it all the more striking when people did self-consciously reflect on the everyday. We see glimpses of this in analysis of Hannah Greg’s diary offered by McGrath, but it comes out most strongly in Ilmakunnas’s chapter: Oxenstierna recording both what he did and how he saw his daily routines fitting into the broader span of his life and his ambitions. One implication of this, which merits further enquiry, is the extent to which a lack of self-reflection fed through to identity formation being a similarly unselfconscious performative process. The routine and reiterative nature of sociability is apparent in many chapters, from Anders Kihlberg’s regular mingling with colleagues and friends, described by Andersson, to the rituals of communal dining and drinking enacted onboard ships bound for the East Indies. Importantly, Hellman also notes how these routines were heavily influenced by class and status: the daily routines of officers were very different from those of the men under their command, with chaplains, writers, and surgeons being caught in a social and spatial middle ground. Equally, Hart notes
234 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart that many of Elizabeth Drinker’s social routines were shaped by her gender and especially her status as wife and mother, which limited access to the homosocial milieu of occupational and mercantile networks. That sociability should be primarily differentiated by distinctions of class and gender is perhaps unsurprising given that most of the individuals considered in this book shared a common European culture. What makes Amaro’s contribution especially important is that he shows how the impact of race on sociability was itself contingent on class and gender but also on individual preferences. Men were more able to enjoy socialising in public, and high-status women could enjoy exclusive gatherings at home or in tea houses; but interactions with and at religious sites were conditioned by an individual’s faith. Across many contributions, the home appears as a key location for sociability but also as a site of social reproduction. This is apparent in the daimyo of wealthy Edonites and the seventeenth-century English homes studied by Hamling and Richardson, invested with particular significance by the careful assembling of furniture that spoke of status or pedigree. Home could be a retreat from the outside world, as Hart shows was the case for the wealthy but politically compromised Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker. However, it could also be a place of conflict and contestation. Andersson argues that the domestic life of the socially and economically secure Anders Kihlberg was compromised by a difficult relationship with his wife, and McGrath demonstrates how recalcitrant servants undermined the domestic authority and happiness of Hannah Greg. This reminds us that established hierarchies of power could be challenged, with important implications for the everyday dynamics and routines of the domestic realm. In many senses, then, home can be seen as a microcosm as well as a building block for wider society. Established norms and practices might generally hold sway but could be overturned in ways that disrupted expected routines but rarely led to a breakdown of society: Kihlberg remained loyal and deeply mourned the death of his wife, and Hannah Greg escaped to Quarry Bank House, reasserting her domestic authority and rediscovering her domestic bliss. Home also emerges as contingent: a ship’s cabin could be home while also being away from home (or quite literally abroad); Amsterdam residents could be away from their house yet ‘at home’ in their neighbourhoods, which, as Pierik shows, were places of familiarly and belonging, and wealthy males were quite ‘at home’ in the dining room of the Assembly House in Turku—again, a product of their daily routines in dining and socialising. In a more alien setting, foreign visitors could feel out of place on Edo’s streets or very much at home in the houses of elite Japanese citizens—their daily routines remodelled around different spatial and cultural settings. Space and spatial scale were thus important in shaping people’s routines and their feeling of belonging, both within the home and more
Conclusion 235 generally. McGrath’s contribution is important in this regard, as it shows with particularly vivid detail how the spatiality of the domestic environment helped to shape family life and the power relations between employers and servants and also how householders sought to engineer social relations through the deployment of space. This same sense of social engineering can be seen in the daimyo in Edo, the rooms of the Assembly House in Turku, and cabins of East India Company ships. Even within the framework provided by walls, doors, and corridors, Hamling and Richardson’s chapter underlines how different practices of assembling and deploying furniture both reflected and reinforced the owner’s conception of home and household. Importantly, space emerges from the pages of our book as something that is in motion. We see this in the flow of people through different districts of Amsterdam or along the streets of Edo or Philadelphia, in the visits made to Stockholm, and in the movement of ships and sailors across oceans and between vessels. People’s daily lives thus occurred both in and through space; they also took place in and over time. The different rhythms followed by different aspects of everyday life are made especially clear through Brown and Stobart’s analysis of country-house gardens. Some of these reflected the natural seasonal changes, but weekly, monthly, and annual cycles of supply, expenditure, and accounting impacted on people’s lives rather than simply appearing as entries in bills and account books. Ilmakunnas, meanwhile, highlights how the nature of daily routines shifted over the course of an individual’s life cycle, from childhood to adulthood and old age. Other practices ran to a diurnal pattern, as Pierik makes clear in his analysis of the daily movement of people across Amsterdam. Key events, such as the bell tolling to signal closure of the city gates, formed punctuation points in both space and time. What all these analyses show is the need to be sensitive to these temporal rhythms in assessing both the importance and impact of routine practices and behaviours. It is easy to imagine that daily routines were most formative of an individuals’ experiences and identity, but weekly or seasonal cycles might be equally important. Finally, it is worth making a methodological observation. Focusing on the everyday and on daily life does not mean adopting a particular method or set of primary materials. Ego documents are the most obvious point of entry into people’s lifeworlds, since they tell us about their daily movements, routines, and preoccupations. If we are fortunate, they also include some self-reflection that allows us a glimpse into the writer’s mind. It is no surprise, then, that most of our contributors have drawn on diaries, journals, and correspondence. However, several have deployed other sources to successfully illuminate different aspects of everyday life. Pierik drew on court records and thus gained access to a much wider set of individuals, whilst Hamling and Richardson and Brown and Stobart drew on inventories, receipted bills, and account books to recreate
236 Gudrun Andersson and Jon Stobart the ebb and flow of household goods and garden plants and produce. Moreover, Pierik’s analysis involves quantifying and aggregate mapping to understand the spatial patterning of people’s routine movements across the city, whilst that of Brown and Stobart charts seasonal trends in overall spending and production. In both cases, it is apparent that the rhythms and routines of daily life can be seen in aggregate as well as for the individual. Overall, then, it is apparent that the mundane and everyday mattered to people’s lives. Daily routines bridged notions of private and public, local and national, domestic and commercial, past and present; indeed, they are the moment where all these intersect. Placing them in the foreground of our analyses is therefore vital to a fuller appreciation of the complexity of an individual’s social milieu and to understanding how these aggregated into broader social practices and relations.
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Index
accounts/account books 10, 20 – 30, 52, 83 – 7, 91 – 4, 96 – 8, 127, 191 Amsterdam 11, 12, 105 – 24 animals 147, 195, 211 – 13, 216 Arboga 12, 169, 171 – 3, 176 – 82, 185, 232 Arbury Hall 84, 86 – 7 aristocracy see elites armies 12, 62, 64, 68, 70, 73, 76 – 7, 193, 197, 201, 203, 206; Continental Army (US) 190 – 1, 202; militia 116 – 17, 190, 201 – 2, 205 – 6 assemblies 5, 8, 125 – 6, 128, 131 – 4, 136 – 9 assembly house 11 – 12, 125 – 39, 233 – 5 assembly rooms 3, 5, 7 – 9, 128 – 9, 132, 139, 176 Audley End 83, 90 – 1, 93 – 6, 99 autumn 66, 68, 93, 95, 183 ballroom 7 – 8, 125, 127, 129, 131, 134, 137 – 8 beds/bedding 6, 25 – 6, 31, 72, 75, 175, 201, 212; bedchamber/-room 8, 26, 53, 55, 184, 200 beggars (low-caste communities) 152, 154, 158 – 9, 162 Belsay Hall 82, 85, 93, 99 biblical imagery 30 – 3, 35 – 6 billiards 7, 127, 129, 135, 137 – 9 bills 1, 23, 28, 83 – 5, 87, 89 – 91, 94 – 5, 98 – 9, 235 bridges 180, 149, 151, 160 – 2 brothels 144, 149, 157, 159 Cádiz 212, 214, 217 – 18, 221, 223 canals 116 – 17, 147, 149, 151, 159
Canton 211 – 12, 218, 223 Cape Colony 217, 224 captain: military 112, 116, 128, 191; at sea 211 – 12, 214 – 15, 218 – 21, 223 – 4 ceramics 20, 34 – 5 Challis, Thomas 83 – 4, 89, 96 – 9, 232 children 25, 30, 42 – 3, 45, 49, 51, 53, 56, 65, 72, 144, 146, 150 – 1, 154, 159, 171, 182 – 3, 197, 199 – 200, 204 city gates 112 – 13, 120, 235 city/urban structure 112, 120, 144, 149, 193 clerks 23, 65, 68 – 9, 71, 128, 144, 190, 196 – 7, 199, 201, 211 clocks/public clocks 108 – 9, 112 – 13, 120 club 132 – 3, 135, 138 – 9 concert 5, 7, 71, 125 – 6, 134, 179 consumer 3, 19, 97, 197 consumption 19, 21, 35, 83, 176, 179, 182, 195, 214 correspondence 64 – 6, 71, 76, 178, 235 councilman 12, 169, 173, 176 – 8, 182, 184 – 6, 232 country house 6, 31, 75, 82 – 3, 88 court of appeal 126 – 7, 134, 136 – 7 court records 2, 107, 235 courtiers 63 – 5, 68, 70, 72 – 3 crime and punishment 107, 201 – 2, 219 – 20 criminals 158 – 9 dancing/dances 3, 64, 125, 127, 129, 131 – 4, 137 – 8, 179, 223 – 4 death 26, 30, 34, 43, 52, 55, 68, 70, 75, 91, 158, 170, 179, 182, 184, 193, 195, 218, 234
256
Index
de Certeau 8, 180 decoration 20, 25, 30 – 3, 43, 89, 129, 149 Delaware River, Pennsylvania 191, 195, 197, 200 diaries 1, 3, 6, 10 – 12, 41, 45 – 6, 48 – 9, 57, 63 – 7, 69 – 76, 82 – 3, 96 – 8, 125, 127, 133, 136, 145 – 7, 149, 152, 154, 156 – 7, 161, 163, 169 – 72, 175, 177 – 82, 184 – 5, 190 – 1, 193 – 6, 198 – 200, 202, 205, 207, 211, 233, 235; see also writing dining 7, 12, 35, 136 – 7, 233 – 4; see also eating and drinking dining room 7, 8 – 9, 25 – 6, 29, 45 – 6, 129, 136 – 8, 152, 234 dinner 71, 75, 136 – 7, 173, 175, 178 – 80, 197 – 8, 223 disease 88, 158, 218, 224; fever 182, 195, 201, 214 districts see neighbourhoods domesticity 31, 211, 244 – 6 domestic life/sphere 29, 32, 34, 37, 57, 105, 183, 234 Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwith 10, 190–1. 195, 197, 199, 203, 206, 234 drunkenness 43, 114 – 15, 149, 152, 157, 161, 203, 214, 219 durability/durables 20 – 1, 24, 19, 37, 197 eating and drinking 1, 3, 6, 9, 105, 135 – 8, 144, 151 – 3, 156, 161, 175, 177 – 9, 190, 210 – 11, 214, 226, 233; see also dining Edo 11 – 12, 144 – 5, 147 – 9, 152 – 4, 156 – 61, 163 – 4, 233 – 5 education 11, 45, 55, 63 – 6, 69, 73, 83, 147, 215, 218, 226 elites 5, 7 – 8, 11 – 12, 26, 28, 45, 51, 57, 62, 65, 67 – 8, 71 – 4, 76 – 7, 116, 126 – 9, 131 – 9, 146, 152, 169, 190 – 1, 193, 195 – 7, 200, 204, 232, 234 emotions 46, 57, 73, 75, 98, 182, 184, 225 entertaining: at home 11, 45 – 6, 53 – 4, 56, 179 – 80, 232; in public 132, 137, 149 – 50, 157, 162, 169, 175 – 6, 179 – 80, 182 ephemerality 20 – 1, 37 Exeter 22, 26
family 41 – 3, 45 – 6, 49 – 57, 62 – 70, 72, 74 – 7, 170 – 1, 173, 179, 181 – 2, 184, 190 – 1, 193, 195 – 6, 203 – 6 fashion/fashionable 19, 22, 29 – 30, 35, 37, 42, 53, 56, 68, 89, 125, 132 – 3, 176, 194, 199, 203 – 4 Faulds, Henry 145 – 6, 149 – 50 feudal lords (daimyō) 144, 146 – 7, 149, 153 – 4, 163 food and drinks 21, 45, 72, 83, 88 – 9, 91, 97, 105, 132, 135 – 7, 152, 171, 178 – 9, 183 – 4, 196 – 7, 205 – 6, 211 – 14, 226 Frankford, Pennslyvania 196 – 7, 203 – 4 Franklin, Benjamin 194 – 5 friendship 45, 65, 74, 146 furniture 9, 20 – 8, 30 – 1, 45, 150, 206, 234 – 5; chairs 24 – 6, 28, 31, 84, 88; desks 8, 70, 75; tables 8 – 9, 24 – 5, 28, 31, 46, 69, 71, 75, 88 – 9, 97, 135 – 9, 152, 178, 214 gardeners 10, 67, 82 – 6, 88 – 91, 93 – 9 garden labourers, tools/equipment, produce 84, 87 – 8, 91, 95, 97, 99 gardens/gardening 10 – 11, 23 – 5, 51, 64, 66 – 8, 75 – 6, 82 – 9, 91, 93 – 9, 153 – 4, 195, 235; public/pleasure gardens 3, 7, 50, 71, 123, 146, 160, 177, 181, 185 gender 3 – 4, 7, 10 – 12, 41, 47, 54, 57, 62 – 4, 77, 83, 105 – 7, 109 – 11, 113 – 14, 118 – 21, 144 – 6, 153, 171, 180, 193 – 7, 199, 202 – 4, 206 – 7, 210, 224 – 6, 234 Gothenburg 212, 216, 218 Gottlund, Carl Axel 125 – 6, 233 Greg, Hannah 11, 41 – 9, 51 – 2, 54 – 6, 233 – 4 Greg, Samuel 11, 41 – 3, 45 – 54, 56 – 7 Gripsholm Castle 76, 173, 176 Grove House, Kensington Gore 91 – 2, 95 – 7 Gustav III 70, 72, 76, 169 Gustav IV Adolph 70, 175 – 6 Gyllenborg, Gustaf Fredrik 64 – 6 Gyllenborg (family) 63, 67 – 9, 74, 75 Hägerstrand, Torsten 7 – 8, 106, 112 handiwork 64, 67, 76 – 7 Harris, Jonathan Gil 19, 30 Hayne, John 22, 25 – 30
Index 257 health 49, 57, 63, 72, 73, 88, 146, 176, 182, 200, 204, 211, 221 Hiltzheimer, Jacob 19, 197, 199, 201 household 6 – 7, 10 – 11, 19 – 20, 22, 25 – 6, 28 – 31, 33, 35, 37 – 8, 41 – 3, 45 – 9, 53 – 4, 56 – 7, 62, 83, 113 – 15, 120, 171, 181 – 5, 196 – 5, 205 – 6, 225, 235 – 6 housekeeping 21, 170, 183, 186, 203, 205 Hyde, Robert 42 – 3 identity 3 – 4, 6 – 7, 9, 12, 21, 28, 30 – 1, 33, 37, 41, 62, 64 – 5, 75, 77, 85, 163, 171, 176, 185 – 6, 192, 215, 226, 232 – 3, 235 inheritance 12, 200, 210 – 11, 224 Java 212, 217 journeys 10, 12, 63, 96, 171 – 3, 175 – 8, 182, 184 – 5, 210 – 11, 215, 219 – 20, 224 – 6; see also travelling Katsu, Kaishū 146, 152; Mrs Katsu 153 – 4 Kihlberg, Anders Adolph 12, 169 – 74, 176 – 86, 232 – 4 kitchen 7, 29, 33, 53, 54, 135, 203, 214 kitchen equipment 26 – 8 kitchen garden 82 – 3, 89, 91, 93 – 7, 99 Kuroda, Tosako 146 – 7, 153 – 4, 156 ladies 51, 72, 125, 151, 153 – 4, 206, 223 – 4 Lancaster, Pennsylvania 196, 203 – 7 law 2, 162, 173, 219 – 20; martial law 190 – 1, 195, 202 Lefebrvre, Henri 8, 106 Leigh, Mary 91 – 2, 95 – 6, 99 leisure 4, 5, 7, 62, 69, 71 – 2, 77, 95, 145, 153, 176, 179, 196, 206, 233; facilities 128 – 9, 134, 137, 176 letter-writing 41, 52, 65 – 6, 68 – 9, 76, 177, 220, 224 life cycle 10 – 11, 20, 37, 64, 72, 76 – 7, 84 – 5, 97, 235 life stage: adolescence 64 – 8, 76; adulthood 68 – 73; childhood 62, 73, 76, 235; old age 73 – 6; parenthood 72 lifestyle 19 – 20, 51, 55, 57, 62, 72, 76 – 7, 126, 131, 135, 154, 171
London 1, 4, 22, 25 – 6, 28, 34, 85, 91 – 3, 96 – 7, 107, 109, 126, 132, 178 Longfellow, Charles 145 – 6, 151, 160 – 1, 164 magistracy 178, 180 maintenance/repairs 20, 23 – 4, 28, 29, 37, 38, 83, 87, 94 – 5, 135, 221, 223 Mälaren (lake) 172 – 3 Manchester 11, 41 – 61; 35 King Street 42 – 9 manufacturer/merchant-manufacturer 11, 43, 46, 50, 51, 55 – 7, 128 markets 20, 25, 26, 87, 112, 151, 193, 194 – 7, 205; marketplace/ market square 1, 113, 182, 185, 195, 196 – 7, 202 marriage 1, 26, 31 – 2, 33, 47, 49, 64, 72, 176, 196, 197, 225; married life 33, 42, 45, 47, 55, 57, 183 – 4 Marshall, Christopher 190 – 209 masculinity 105, 186, 223 – 5 masquerades 131 – 2, 133, 137 merchant 12, 22, 26, 42, 43, 55, 72, 126, 128, 151, 152, 169, 176, 178, 182, 185, 191, 232 microhistory 2 – 3, 9, 11, 63 – 4, 76 middling sort/middle class 6, 7, 10, 11, 19, 21, 22, 26, 30 – 1, 33, 37, 144, 170, 171, 196, 198, 223 military 12, 70, 128, 177, 179, 183, 191, 193 – 5, 201 – 2, 211 mobility: of goods 91 – 2, 236; of people 11, 105 – 24; radius of mobility 107, 109 – 10 Monck, Sir Charles 82, 87 – 9, 97 – 8, 99 movement (spatial) 7, 8, 10, 172 – 7, 180, 195, 199 – 206; see also journeys; mobility; travelling nagaya 150, 153, 159 needlework 69, 72, 75, 196; see also handiwork neighbourhoods 11, 105, 107 – 8, 114 – 20, 146, 234; commoner districts, Edo 149 – 52; feudal lord districts, Edo 152 – 4; temple districts 154 – 7 Nelson, George 190 – 209 networks: social 9 – 10, 65, 115 – 16, 126, 127, 136, 139, 176, 185, 204; supply 83, 89 – 90
258 Index Newdigate, Sir Roger 84 – 5, 87 nobility 62 – 3, 64, 68 – 9, 70, 73, 126 nurserymen/seedsmen 84 – 5, 87 – 9 Oxenstierna, Johan Gabriel 62 – 81 parlour 7, 8, 9, 15, 31, 45, 204 performance/performativity 3, 4, 232, 233 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 190 – 209 pilgrims 156 – 7 plants/planting 67, 83 – 5, 87 – 99, 236; see also seeds pleasure 63, 65, 67, 72, 74, 98, 129, 159 – 63; pleasure boats 159 – 60; pleasure gardens/grounds 50, 71, 93, 99, 125, 156 poetry 64, 65, 71, 74 – 5 politeness 4, 5 – 6, 136, 139, 221 polite society 125 – 43, 199 political: activities/career 11, 22, 68, 71 – 2, 171; events 191 – 2, 201; identities 12, 195, 202 – 3, 206 priests 154 – 5, 156 production: domestic 20, 24, 28; garden 83, 84, 95 – 7, 99 prostitutes 224 provisioning 19, 34, 82, 195 – 6, 198, 202, 205, 206 Puckering, Sir Thomas 21 – 30 quakers 190, 191, 196 – 8, 202, 203, 204 Quarry Bank Mill/Quarry Bank House 11, 42, 43, 49 – 57 reading 3, 6, 8, 68, 71, 75, 77, 160, 191, 198 religious activities 3, 154 – 5, 161, 198, 199, 215; institutions/spaces 144, 147, 149, 154, 156, 157, 194, 234 respectability 42, 55, 57, 176 restaurant 127, 129, 135 – 8 rhythms 6, 10, 12, 22, 65, 82 – 91, 94, 98 – 9, 120, 127, 131, 194, 215, 225, 235 sailors 12, 210 – 12, 214 – 16, 220, 221, 223 – 5, 235 Saitō, Gesshin 146 – 7, 152, 156, 161 Sakai, Hanjirō 146 – 7, 152 – 3, 156, 161
samurai 144, 146, 147, 149, 152, 153, 159, 161 Satow, Ernest 145 – 6, 156 seasons: climatic 68, 151, 226; social 131, 133 – 5; see also autumn; gardens/gardening; spring; summer; winter seeds 67, 83 – 5, 87, 89 – 91, 94; see also plants/planting servants 1, 21, 23, 24, 25, 43, 54, 56, 82, 85, 152, 158, 182, 196, 203, 211, 232; servants’ relationship with employer 47 – 9, 54, 183, 196, 234; servants’ rooms 53 sexual adventures/relations 146 – 7, 149, 161, 220, 224 Shibata, Shūzō 147, 152, 156 – 61 Shinagawa 157 – 9, 163 ships 210 – 31; chaplains 211 – 12, 214, 215, 218 – 19, 223, 224, 225, 233; salutes 221; surgeon 211, 214, 215, 219, 223, 224, 233; writers 211, 214, 215, 218, 219, 220, 223; see also sailors ship’s cabins 211 – 12, 214, 219 – 20, 234 – 5 shopping 1, 4, 5, 26, 28, 176, 196 shops 1, 9, 152, 164, 194, 195 – 6, 197 sickness/illness 52, 184, 194, 195, 199 – 201, 204, 206, 214 Skenäs, Sweden 63, 65, 67, 69, 72, 73 – 6 sociability 5 – 6, 9, 12, 69, 73, 125 – 43, 179, 180, 184 – 6, 199, 211, 220 – 4 social calendar 131, 134; see also season, social social hierarchies 6 – 7, 12, 55, 94, 97, 144, 146, 163, 178, 180, 193, 210, 214, 220, 234 soldiers 150, 177, 179 spas 5, 128, 196 spatial theory/turn 7, 8, 163 spectators 129, 132, 137 spring 68, 82, 90, 91, 93, 131 Stockholm 63, 64, 66, 67, 69, 72, 73, 76, 126, 132, 169, 171 – 7, 179, 180, 183, 184 – 5, 232 Stoneleigh Abbey, England 89 – 92, 96, 99 streets 3, 4, 9 – 10, 11, 105, 108, 111, 113 – 14, 117, 146, 147, 149 – 53, 159, 181, 201, 234, 235; street sellers/vendors 150, 151, 161, 162
Index 259 study (learning) 7, 64 – 5, 66, 69, 72 – 3, 76 Sumida River 147, 149, 154, 159, 161 summer 24, 28, 41, 52, 66, 67 – 8, 73, 75, 91, 93, 95, 97, 131, 154, 161 – 2 supercargoes 211, 214, 215, 219 – 21, 223, 224, 225 surveillance 47, 113, 119, 144, 146, 154, 162 Swedish East India Company 210, 211 – 14, 216, 223, 224 – 5, 226 tableware 29 – 30, 34 – 5; spoon 3, 30 taverns 4, 114, 178, 184 tea 3, 75, 126, 132, 160, 195, 198, 211, 234 tea girls 156, 160 – 1, 163 teahouses/tea rooms 8, 9, 144, 146, 149, 152, 156, 157 – 61, 232 temples 146, 150, 154 – 6, 159, 161; temple zones 151, 154 – 7 temporality 10, 19 – 20, 21, 32, 34, 35, 37 – 8 Tōkaidō Road 147, 149, 150, 157, 159 town halls 177 – 8, 179, 180, 181 travel journals 145 – 7 travellers 134, 138, 150, 158 – 9 travelling 1 – 12, 21, 25, 63, 72 – 3, 108, 111 – 12, 144, 147, 150 – 1, 154, 158, 172 – 3, 178, 180, 197, 211, 219, 221 Turku (Åbo) 125 – 43; Turku Assembly House Company 128, 135
Uppsala University 65, 67, 68 Västerås, Sweden 173, 175, 179, 185 Vienna 69, 70, 71, 72, 76 violence 149, 157 – 9, 223 Wachschlager, Lovisa Christina (wife of J G Oxenstierna) 63, 64 wages 84 – 5, 89, 94 walking 3, 4, 105, 149, 151, 180 – 1, 194; as leisure 68, 151 – 2, 179 war 70, 201; American Revolutionary 191, 193, 201 – 3, 206; Finnish 169, 177, 179; see also armies; military warehouses 50, 56, 159 Whitney, Clara 146, 152, 153 – 4, 161, 232 will/testament 30, 31 winter 24, 66, 67, 68, 71, 90 – 1, 93, 94, 97, 132, 197, 203 Winter, Johan 127, 131 – 2, 133, 135, 136 – 7 work 4, 6, 10 – 11, 12, 52, 62 – 81, 83, 90, 91, 94 – 7, 98, 113 – 14, 182, 195, 211, 233; in administration 65, 68 – 70, 176, 177, 180; kin work 64, 65 – 6; of leisure 62, 71 – 2, 74 – 5, 126; manual 66 – 7, 68; by servants 23, 24, 54, 127, 153; on ships 214 – 18, 221, 223, 226 writing 4, 198, 205; of diaries/ memoirs 35, 63, 73, 74, 88, 146 – 7, 169 – 70, 171, 178, 180, 181, 184, 194, 207, 233; of letters 65 – 6, 68, 69, 76, 177