Webography, Buying Respectability

“Buying respectability” refers to rapidly changing developments in eighteenth-century consumer expectations and practices. These phenomena transformed life styles and living standards and revolutionized commerce and technology. Following are links to bibliographic and textual resources that relate to these societal changes in British America, especially Virginia.

Internet Resources from Colonial Williamsburg

Buying Respectability
The “Buying Respectability” story line describes the “consumer revolution,” the far-reaching transformation in people's standards and styles of living that revolutionized trade, commerce, technology, and, ultimately, the way people lived at every level of society. Seeking respectability, many people craved fashionable wardrobes, formal houses, the latest tableware, and a variety of social refinements. For further understanding, please read the key points for this story line.

Provisioning Tidewater Towns
How did townspeople in Virginia and Maryland supply themselves with food and fuel? This report surveys the preliminary results of an extended interdisciplinary study of urban provisioning systems in the Chesapeake region in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Common People and Their Material World: Free Men and Women in the Chesapeake
The proceedings of the March 1992 conference that examined the material lives of the common people who populated the Chesapeake from 1700 to 1830. Participants in three sessions—Standards of Living, Rural and Urban Life, and Folkways and Formalities—addressed the lives of the ordinary folk who are still often overlooked in the study of eighteenth-century society and culture.

The Bates Site: Investigation of a Quaker Merchant, by Patricia M. Samford. 1990.
This document reports on the excavation of a site owned by a wealthy Quaker planter and merchant in the early eighteenth century. The artifact assemblage of a trash deposit shows the range of ceramics available to the area residents in about 1700. The assemblage and historical documentation in the form of a 1720 store inventory are compared to that of other early eighteenth-century Virginia merchants.

Homes of the gentry, the middling sort, and slaves:
The George Wythe House
The Benjamin Powell House
The Slave Quarter at Carter’s Grove

An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Clothing
The clothing worn by eighteenth-century Virginians was characterized by great diversity, as one would expect in a society ranging from royal governors and wealthy landowners to indentured servants and slaves.

Tradesmen in the Virginia Gazette
A database of advertisements for selected years of the Virginia Gazette. Tables have been compiled that include “Skilled Slaves” and “Summary of Advertisers by Trade”.

Virginia Gazette
Browse through the want ads; use the alphabetical index for goods such as china, chocolate or violins; for individual trades such as hairdressers and watchmakers; for slaves, women and indentured servants.

York County Probate Inventories, 1700-1780
These transcriptions of probate inventories list household possessions and reveal patterns of consumption throughout the eighteenth century.

Recommended Readings

This reading list features classic histories and recent monographs selected by historians in Colonial Williamsburg’s Department of Historical Research. The list is recommended to interpreters, to teachers, and to general readers who are eager to learn more about early America and colonial Virginia. Periodically the list is refreshed with important new additions to an ever growing literature.

Articles from Colonial Williamsburg: The Journal

Wills Simple and Elaborate: Bequests, Gifts, and Legacies, by James Breig, Summer 2007.
The last testaments of the early citizens of Williamsburg provide details about how they lived and who owned what.

“Tailor Made for History”, by Ed Crews, Autumn 2005
Most colonial Americans bought their clothes. Few lived so self-sufficient an existence that they wove cloth, carved buttons, and stitched together fabric in front of the fireplace. Almost everybody in eighteenth-century Virginia from slaves to merchants to royal governors required a tailor.

“Halting Time through the Illusion of Portraiture”, text by Barbara Luck, photos by Hans Lorenz, Summer 2005
Images of loved ones have universal appeal, but portraits of children occupy a special niche among our tangible treasures. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century parents commissioned likenesses of their offspring for the same reasons that prompt us to bedeck our youngsters in Sunday-best attire and haul them off to the photographer's, if not the portrait painter's.

“Alas, Poor…Who? Or, Melancholy Moments in Colonial and Later Virginia”, by Ivor Noël Hume, Spring 2005
As today, coffins came in grades and complexities reflecting real or supposed wealth or social status. The poorest families rented the reusable parish coffin and went to their Maker in no more than a winding sheet. The simplest wooden coffins were of pine, often covered with fabric secured with black-painted brass tacks. But if one were as cautious as John Custis, the inner coffin would be of elm lined with fabric, this encased in lead of a thickness weighing five pounds per square foot.

“Colonial Dress Codes”, by Linda Baumgarten, Winter 2003-04
Some people attended balls dressed in the finest silks, while others went about their daily business, labored in the home or fields, or ran off in search of opportunity. Their clothing was as diverse as they were. Yet few were entirely free to choose their own clothing styles. Everyone was caught up in the dress codes created by fashion, social expectations, occupational necessities, status, and economics.

“Plain and Neat: Cabinetmakers Preserve Colonial Craftsmanship”, by Ed Crews, Summer 2003
Before 1650, fine furniture was a rarity in western Europe and North America. Generally, people neither needed nor could afford it. They made do with simple but serviceable pieces. That changed when international trade fueled a business boom and created a middle class hungry for status, comfort, and more wealth.

“Aesthetic Appeal: Jewelry from Our Collection”, text by Marilyn S. Melchor, photos by Hans Lorenz and Tom Green, Spring 2003
Precious and semiprecious stones—diamonds, rubies, emeralds, topaz, and garnets—were as highly prized in the colonial period as they are today, as were gold and silver. Yet some of the most attractive items were what we would call costume jewelry and were valued entirely for their aesthetic appeal.

“How Much Is That in Today’s Money?” by Ed Crews, Summer 2002
One of the most frequent inquiries from visitors to Colonial Williamsburg is about money. How much is that in today’s money? It’s an obvious, simple, direct, and logical question. Yet, for all its simplicity and directness, economists say that “how much” is a devilishly complex riddle.

“Taking the Cure: Colonial Spas, Springs, Baths and Fountains of Health”, by Harold B. Gill, Jr., Summer 2002
Springs have long attracted people for more than their medicinal powers. Scattered down the ribs of Virginia’s westernmost mountains, the springs were resorts where the well-to-do and the fashionable escaped the humid summer seaboard heat. Even before Jefferson’s day, the better sort gathered at the waters for good accommodations, good company, and good food.

“To Bathe or Not to Bathe: Coming Clean in Colonial America”, by Edwards Park, Autumn 2000
In America's colonial days, getting clean meant sponging off, usually just face and hands. A few of the better homes furnished bedrooms with chinaware washbasins and pitchers. Servants supplied the water, heated in the kitchen or laundry, and laid out clean shifts for the ladies and fresh shirts for the gentlemen. In Williamsburg, shortly before the end of the eighteenth century, St. George Tucker installed the first copper bathtub recorded in the city.

“The Millinery Shop”, by Edward R. Crews, Winter 1997-98
When it comes to shopping, buying and keeping pace with changing fashion, our colonial ancestors could teach us a thing or two. Fashion in colonial Virginia was vibrant, fickle, fleeting, fun and something of an obsession for the middle and upper classes. It also was part of the trans-Atlantic trade between Great Britain and her American colonies.

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Subjects:

Consumer behavior
Consumer goods
Consumers
Consumption economics
Material culture Virginia
Social classes Virginia
Virginia economic conditions

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Other Internet Resources

Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities, 1550-1820
Author Nancy Cox and Karin Dannehl from the Dictionary Project at the University of Wolverhampton have compiled a dictionary of nearly 4,000 terms found used in documents relating to trade and retail in early modern Britain.

Gunston Hall Plantation Probate Inventory Database, 1740-1810
This site has transcriptions of more than 300 probate inventories from selected counties in Virginia and Maryland. The inventories are lists of the personal and chattel property of the deceased at the time of death. Household furnishings appearing in these inventories form the basis for an extensive database that reveals patterns of household consumption, social class, and urban versus rural distinctions.

Additional plantation sites:
Monticello
Mount Vernon
Stratford Hall

The Leslie Brock Center for the Study of Colonial Currency
Pamphlets, other contemporary documents, and additional readings on colonial currencies and related economic topics

The Current Value of Old Money
Various online tools for determining the purchasing power of old money

Subscription Resources

America: History and Life
Indexes over 2,000 historical journals published worldwide. Approximately 16,000 new entries are added each year. A search for “consumerism” in the Subject box and “1700H” as the Time Period will yield citations to some relevant articles.

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800
Full-text books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the renowned bibliography by Charles Evans - the definitive resource for information about every aspect of life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, witchcraft, and just about any other topic imaginable.

America's Historical Newspapers, Series I, 1690-1876
Hundreds of historic newspapers listed in Clarence Brigham's authoritative bibliography and in additional subsequent bibliographies.