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Barbara Johnson's Album: Material Literacy and Consumer Practice, 1746‐1823
Author(s) -
Dyer Serena
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12616
Subject(s) - literacy , consumption (sociology) , daughter , financial literacy , art , sociology , visual arts , art history , law , pedagogy , aesthetics , political science , economics , finance
This article examines Barbara Johnson's Album, a prolific record of the dress consumption of a vicar's daughter. The album contains over a hundred samples of dress fabrics acquired by Johnson between the ages of eight and eighty‐five. Interrogated alongside the Johnson family correspondence and didactic tools produced by Johnson's mother, this article argues that the album acted as a material form of account book, conceived as a moral, financial and material regulator. Considered within the emerging framework of material knowledge and consumer skill, the album provides important evidence of how consumers maintained and developed their material literacy.