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A Marketplace in Miniature: Norwich Pattern Books as Cultural Agency

The research questions addressed in Mitchell’s article arose from work for the 'Norwich Textile Project' (a collaboration with Norwich Castle Museums, 2004 - ongoing) together with on-going research into the wider field of textile culture as a significant component of material culture. It considers the visual evidence of an exceptional resource (18th century books of samples, in Norwich, London and Winterthur, Delaware) for understanding production, trade and developing consumerism in relation to 18th century pre-industrial textiles. Although there has been significant research in this field, the evidence of the samples themselves has been little studied; reflection on and evaluation of the visual evidence is supported here by critical insights from material culture and 18th century studies of consumerism.

In the light of the paper a number of garments and large samples from collections in the United States, many as yet unpublished, have been identified. Evidence of these was presented in a paper ‘From pattern sample to wedding dress: an example from eighteenth century Norwich’ at the International Pasold / Chord conference ‘Distribution Networks for Textiles and Dress 1700-1945’ convened at the University of Wolverhampton, September 2010. A further paper ‘“The only true book”: patterns of exchange between text and textile in catalogues of samples from eighteenth-century Norwich’ was presented at the ‘Texts and Textiles’ conference organised by the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts, held at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, August 2012.