Abstract
The legal battle over Bristol Customs official John Elbridge’s will opened with a contretemps about a small classical house and its furnishings.1 Despite an extraordinary inheritance of more than £10,000, Elbridge’s niece Rebecca Woolnough and her husband accused his executors of illicitly seeking to sell the possessions at Elbridge’s house, Cote. Although the executors offered to compensate Mrs Woolnough with furnishings from another house Elbridge owned near Bristol, she insisted there were ‘some few pieces of furniture’ that she was bent on having for herself. Appraisers drew up an inventory, which the Woolnoughs called ‘an Imperfect Schedule’ because it aggregated several of the best rooms rather than valuing individual objects. Although the household contents at Elbridge’s two dwellings were worth similar amounts — £290.8.10 and £303.12.8 respectively -the Woolnoughs insisted that ‘the furniture over the Down are of much greater Value’. Throughout the proceedings, Rebecca Woolnough displayed both emotional attachment to the goods at Cote house and a keen sense of their worth. In her desire to lay claim to ‘some few pieces of furniture’ she highlighted how individual pieces could be pivotal within the domestic setting. Such multi-layered reactions indicate how and in what ways objects displayed status for genteel people.
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Notes
J. Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors (London and New Haven, 2004), x.
A. Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London, 1998), 229.
The idea draws largely on T. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York, 1899), and tends to be the more usual line taken by architectural and decorative arts historians.
See also N. McKendrick, ‘The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England’, in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, (eds), The Birth of Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1982), 9–33.
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In England this was especially the case from the late sixteenth to the late seventeenth century, whilst evidence for Massachusetts sees a steep decline between the 1670s and 1770s. See C. Shammas, ‘Changes in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550 to 1800’, in J. Brewer and R. Porter, (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993), 190–193, especially tables 9.7 and 9.8. Cornforth calls this the ‘primacy of upholstery’, see Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors, 75.
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This room almost certainly functioned as a personal informal sitting area. Cornforth, lor instance, notes that comfortable seating furniture, such as easy chairs, only began to appear in parlours from the 1730s. Cornforth, Early Georgian Interiors, 42. See also J. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and America (Baltimore, 2001), 145–146.
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Both Virginia walnut and mahogany became much more readily available after the passing of the Naval Stores Act in 1721. See A. Bowett, ‘The Commercial Introduction of Mahogany and the Naval Stores Act of 1721’, Furniture History, vol. 30 (1994), 43–57;
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Hague, S. (2015). Furnishing Status. In: The Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic World 1680–1780. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378385_6
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