Reviews

Material Lives: Women Makers and Consumer Culture in the 18th Century by Serena Dyer

shanaqui's review

challenging informative slow-paced

3.0

Material Lives is a book that reassesses the archival material we have for four women from the 18th century, assessing the things they made as well as consumed, looking at the things they stitched and created instead of just their letters or the things others said about them. Dyer positions them almost as autobiographical, though in each case that claim is weaker than she makes it sound at first (e.g. she says several times that Laetitia Powell's dolls wear miniature versions of her own clothes, and then in that actual chapter it becomes obvious that several of the garments could not have existed, and in fact there's only one that we can be fairly sure is a copy of a garment Powell wore).

I mostly found it interesting for the way it showcases (in full colour) what the women made and what skills that required: I didn't know anything about "dressed" prints, and might have dismissed the amount of work that went into them, without Dyer's careful discussion of the work that went into them.

I think this is aimed at a pretty academic audience, and you can tell because of the tiresomely pretentious phrasing.  We can't say "the wedding doll clearly marked an emotional milestone", no, it's "the affective resonance of the wedding doll is explicit". I can read this kind of deliberately obfuscated literariness, but it makes me roll my eyes -- both my dissertations in both my very different fields were readable by a layperson, and if they weren't, I fixed that. Specialised vocabulary is one thing, but there's no need to sound like that.

elliemonks's review against another edition

A wonderful piece of work! A great discussion of the change in consumer culture that took place in the 18th century.